Sometimes spawning a child process is not successful.
This attempts to fertilize the process by being stubborn,
retrying a number of times before eventually giving up.
Therefore this isn't quite the same as "crazy",
which people like to quote.
The following is just a use-case. Retrying stuff can be justified / useful, even with computers...
Sometimes (and in some cases often) rsync will fail to sync
(due to "Broken pipe" or something).
There is a known bug
the solution for which is to keep retrying...
That's exactly what this script does.
Call it like you otherwise would rsync.
The only difference being that if you pass a number as the very first argument,
it will run that many number of times. If you give it 0, it will run forever
until done. If no number is provided, it will use some hardcoded default,
which supposedly has better chances than the otherwise usual rsync once.
All about rsync...
fertilize 3 rsync something /dev/null
Spawns rsync something /dev/null and probably fails 3 times in a row.
It could be because the something is missing or /dev/null doesn't allow it.
Be careful with fertilize 0 something - it easily becomes an infinite loop...
So be convinced the something is likely to exit with a status of 0.
Zero (being success) is fitting for an exit, it otherwise goes on for infinity.
Back to the motivation / use-case...
This was prompted by a need to move some files from HFS to NTFS. NTFS because it's the most reliable file-system that I can currently mount with both Mac OS and Linux. Cut & paste produced some weird errors and rsync periodically does the broken pipe thing. The NTFS-3G driver, being kind of slow, made it worse. I wish I could just use ZFS...
So here is how I tend to move files:
fertilize 999 rsync -ptr --partial --size-only --remove-source-files --stats {source} {target}/
It preserves permissions (if possible) and the timespamps, syncs the files recursively, removes whatever is synced, and provides stats in the end.
The stats are those of the last run and only if successful up to attempt 999,
so they are just indicator of overall success, especially useful if your prompt
doesn't display exit status. The source directories are kept around - as there
doesn't seem to be an option for removing them as well. I don't use --progress
with this - it would print a line every second. Maybe there is or will be
some other way to pass on child process stdout (without doing console.log)?
Of-course rsync is useful for all kinds of copying and stuff -- like keeping files in sync, backup, etc.
With the npm prerequisite, do npm install -g fertilize.
This is free and unencumbered public domain software. For more information, see http://unlicense.org/ or the accompanying {file:UNLICENSE} file.