On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, Ross Hosman wrote: > Does anyone see anything wrong with this crontab > > * */6 * * * rsync -avz [blah blah blah] well, nothing seriously wrong, except you keep launching every four hours, no matter what. so, if a sync does not complete in four hours, you will see multiple instances. i would suspect that the entire 5 tree is not syncing up in 4 hours, so you see multiple instances. i will offer a couple of suggestions. ditch the z option; most content is already compressed, why try another z on top of it? only end up causing needless cpu load. write a small script and call the script from crontab; the script could have a couple of lines to do locking so multiple instances will not occur - it would look like so (shameless lifted from debian) HOSTNAME=`hostname -f` LOCK="somewhere/Archive-Update-in-Progress-${HOSTNAME}" # Check to see if another sync is in progress if lockfile -! -l 43200 -r 0 "$LOCK"; then echo ${HOSTNAME} is unable to start rsync, lock file exists exit 1 fi -- sriram