ChinnoDog's blog

A frequent scenario I come across when administering Ubuntu servers is that I want to rsync a directory (e.g. a web site) from one server to another but the destination is not writable by my user account. I have permission on the destination via the sudo command but rsync does not have built in support for this. This is rather annoying as I don’t want to enable the root account on the destination just to use rsync and I don’t want to give myself more permissions on the destination since I already have them through sudo. I found some kludge on the web that mostly didn’t work for me so worked out a solution myself. I present the first version of sudorsync, an rsync command that uses sudo! Save this to a file and make it executable and use the same as the rsync command. I’m not an experienced bash programmer so any improvements or suggestions are appreciated.

#!/bin/bash

#************************************************#
#                   sudorsync                    #
#           written by Stephen Nichols           #
#         Email: ChinnoDog@lonesheep.net         #
#                August 6, 2010                  #
#                                                #
#        rsync using sudo on remote end          #
#************************************************#

BUILD=1		#will write routine to print this with -? later

stty -echo
read -p "[sudorsync] password for remote user: " REMOTEPASS; echo
stty echo

# update the sudo timestamp as part of the remote rsync command
rsync --rsync-path="echo $REMOTEPASS|sudo -S -p $(()) -v;sudo rsync" $*

The early versions of Adobe Air wouldn’t open links in twirl in Chrome when I ran it on Windows.  The current version won’t open links in Chromium when I run it in Ubuntu.  I found this article that indicates the problem and fix. Here is the two line version of the fix. Adjust it if you aren’t running Ubuntu 9.04 (Intrepid) or wish to use a different browser.

sudo perl -i.bak -p -e 's/firefox/browser/g' /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/chromium-browser /usr/bin/browser

Note: This modifies part of Adobe Air, and you will probably have to rerun the first line if you install an Air upgrade. If this blows up your Air install just delete libCore.so and rename libCore.so.bak to libCore.so.