Unison - A file sync application

Most system admins know about rsync. It is a really good tool to synchronize between different machines because it only moves data that happen to be changed. It lacks some things however. One of the things it is lacking is interactivity. Unison is a tool written by Benjamin C. Pierce and a couple of other guys. Pierce is a type theory researcher and he likes writing ocaml programs. But you should not let that put you off Unison. It uses the rsync protocol down below ;) When it sync's 2 sites it will ask you which way to propagate changes. It is also much more clever when it comes to shortcutting work. It can, for instance, detect that a file was moved so it has a local copy of that file it can use in the sync process. My preferred usage is to sync. directory contents between machines I work on. It often happens that I have worked on the machines in a way such a 2-way sync is needed. And Unison can give you that right away while it will be pain in rsync. Pierce now works on the Boomerang language which is really interesting. But I'll save that for a later post.