#UNISON FILE SYNCHRONISATION HOW TO#

The -batch option does not ask any questions at all, which is more convenient if there are a lot of files. Unison /path/to/dir1 /path/to/dir2 -batch -times This command without any arguments requires you to confirm every file to be synched (by pressing f) before it eventually starts to copy the files.Īfter confirming the above with y Unison starts to copy and displays the result like this:Īfter trying it out a few times and reading through the rather comprehensive documentation, I eventually settled with the following command: For my task at hand it was as simple as this command: Once installed, Unison is ready to go and doesn‘t require much learning. I opted for the latter, which can be installed on macOS via Homebrew by running this command in the Terminal.app: Unison is free and available as a GUI app for different platforms or as a command line tool. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other. Unison is a file-synchronization tool for OSX, Unix, and Windows.

#UNISON FILE SYNCHRONISATION HOW TO#

While researching on how to possible get this done the easy way, I discovered Unison, which sounded exactly like what I was looking for. Since rsync is a “uni-directional mirroring utility” it would have required two passes to get both directories in sync. I started looking into it and first tried rsync to get the job done. I wanted to find a way to do it via the command line. This week, I needed to synch folders again and while there are a few apps like that on the App Store, the few times I need it, don’t rectify buying one.

In the past I used a synchronisation app to get this done, but somewhere along the way of macOS system updates, it stopped working and I never bothered to get another one.

Every once in a while I need to get two folders synchronised.

Unison file synchronisation