Re: getting head: illegal line count -- -31

Subject: Re: getting head: illegal line count -- -31

Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:06:50 -0700

In-reply-to: <CALpOZyO6EPghDJmg-D=rT+TD3jAJjF20uUbMgcSoHyd6uxtmOA@mail.gmail.com>

References: <53ED306C.1080801@mtnlion.com> <00000147d6f310b5-9e4f7dc1-c501-4c98-a4ba-936a0c0f8bbd-000000@email.amazonses.com> <53EE331C.7050304@mtnlion.com> <00000147da929742-54795a05-977c-42bb-8d15-48faa911874c-000000@email.amazonses.com> <CALpOZyO6EPghDJmg-D=rT+TD3jAJjF20uUbMgcSoHyd6uxtmOA@mail.gmail.com>

Thanks, Alex.
I updated to your latest commit and all is well. The output is much more verbose now, particularly around daily deletes. One suggestion: as you show the delete tallies, you say "This archive" but there is no reference to which archive is being handled. Might be nice to know what "this" refers to.

Thanks again for your fast update and thanks to Colin for the change.

Bob

On 8/15/2014 7:35 PM, Alex Jurkiewicz wrote:

Thanks Colin for your patch & Bob for the report, I've committed the fix and a few other improvements while I was at it :-)

On 16 August 2014 02:49, Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com> wrote:

[CCing Alex since it's his code we're talking about here...]

On 08/15/14 09:19, Bob wrote:
> On 8/14/2014 4:55 PM, Colin Percival wrote:
>> On 08/14/14 14:55, Bob wrote:
>>> I am running ACTS to do my backups and cleanup my archive. Everything was fine
>>> for a month or so, now I get "
>>>
>>> head: illegal line count -- -31" at the end of the tarsnap backup. As far as I
>>> can tell, everything is still being backed up, but this message must mean
>>> something. Can anyone help?
>> That would be a problem with the script you're using -- looks like it's in the
>> part of the script which deletes old daily backups. The "-n negative number"
>> option to the head utility is nonportable and presumably doesn't exist on your
>> operating system.
>>
> That makes sense. I am using freeBSD 9.2. The only thing is that daily backup
> removal was going fine for a while. I am not an expert at this. Is there a fix
> or a different way to attack backup management?

Probably you never had an error earlier because you had less than 31 daily
backups and so none of them needed to be deleted.

I think the easiest solution here is for 'head -n -X' to be replaced by
'sort -rn | tail +$(X+1)' -- Alex, do you want to make this change?

--
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid