On Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:14:17 Ciprian Dorin Craciun wrote:
>     Hello all!
> 
>     While struggling with managing various old backups --- just
> imagine 10 or so copies of almost the same content, some with `rsync`,
> some with `rdiff-backup`, yet some others on plain ISO's, all over a
> range of a few years --- I stumbled upon the following missing piece
> in the Linux tools ecosystem:  a file-system crawler that records
> **only** meta-data, like all the info available through `stat`, plus
> an assortment of hashes of the files (at least MD5 and SHA-1,2
> family), and optionally ACL's and extended attributes.  Thus I was
> wondering if someone knows a tool that fits this description.
> 
> 
>     I must say I've tried to do my homework, and below are a few tools
> that come close, but not quite...
> 
>     (A) `rdup` is probably the closest to what I'm searching.  However
> there are a few issues:
>     * it's output format is not very parsable, especially in cases
> like symlinks, and a few other special cases;
>     * it doesn't escape the file names --- and from some reason I have
> files containing escape sequences in them...
>     * it records only SHA-1;
>     * it doesn't handle ACL's or extended attributes;
> 
>     (B) `mtree` from FreeBSD.  I found two ports of it for Linux,
> however my main concern is how parsable is the output...
> 
>     (C) `md5deep` (or `sha*deep`), which only records the checksum not
> other meta-data.
> 
> 
>     Thus, are there any other alternatives?  (Just to be clear, I
> don't need a "backup" solution, just something to record file-system
> meta-data.  Maybe a "meta-backup" solution... :) )
> 
>     Ciprian.


Have a look at 'tripwire'. It's primarily an intrusion detection tool, but it does the job 
by recording file meta-data and checksums, then checking to see if they have 
changed. I can't remember if it handles ACL's, as it's been a few years since I used it.


-- 
Reverend Paul Colquhoun, ULC.     http://andor.dropbear.id.au/
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