Increase verbosity of running rsync process?

Question

I'm running 'rsync -a -i /foo /bar'. Every now and then I would like to know what exactly rsync is doing at the moment without having the -v output all the time. Is it possible to increase the verbosity of running processes e.g. by sending a kill signal?

Answer 1

I would redirect the output in a file and then tail -f to see the output when desired:

rsync -a /foo /bar >/tmp/rsync.log 2>&1

when needed:

tail -f /tmp/rsync.log

Answer 2

I use rsync -v --stats --progress

Answer 3

In addition of -i, you can use --progress for more verbosity in sending data. for example:

rsync -ai --progress .....

If need more and more the better way is logging it as @Marc M said above.

Answer 4

The rsync documentation does not describe such behaviour, nor is there a (proper or de-facto) standard signal to send to a process in order to modify its verbosity.

However thanks to the incremental nature of rsync you should be able to abort a running rsync with Ctrl+C and re-run it with '-v' and not lose much time as a consequence.