File types in filter configuration

[mjdtjm2]

Thank you for your great work on FreeFileSync.
I'm using it on Debian Linux for years and it's very good.
A suggestion: Add an option to the Filter configuration window for including/Excluding some file types in/from synching operation. For example: socket, fifo, named pipe, symbolic link, ...

[xCSxXenon]

There are inclusion and exclusion filters

[huuurz]

Mmhm there currently is no real file type filter.

*.doc


will also match a folder like that:

source\something.doc\somefile.txt


You would need e.g. a "stop" character like $ in RegExps:

*.doc$


[xCSxXenon]

True, but having periods on directory names is bad practice in the first place

[Paladyn]

I, too, wish to have an exclusion filter for symbolic links (Windows). Through an inclusion filter they are attempted to copy--which is the only error my process has.

[Zenju]

I, too, wish to have an exclusion filter for symbolic links (Windows).

"Symbolic Link Handling"
https://freefilesync.org/manual.php?topic=comparison-settings

[Elhem Enohpi]

I'd also appreciate the ability to exclude socket files, in particular. There are a number of them on my Mac, and they don't necessarily have any particlular file extension, so it's not possible to use a wildcard. They stop the sync process, so I had to enter every pathname into the exclude filter. It would be more convenient to have a checkbox to ignore them all. Socket files, at least on Unix/Mac, are created and destroyed as needed by the application, so there's no need to copy them, nor to worry about the fact that they're not copied (I don't know about Windows, but I think it's the same).

PS, I found a few other threads asking about it:

viewtopic.php?t=6106&p=20097&hilit=socket#p20097
viewtopic.php?t=600&p=2263&hilit=socket#p2263
viewtopic.php?t=2285&p=9507&hilit=socket#p9507
viewtopic.php?t=3724&p=12487&hilit=socket#p12487

[Zenju]

I'd also appreciate the ability to exclude socket files [...] They stop the sync process

Is that really the case? Trying to copy a socket should fail with an error, not hang the process.

[Elhem Enohpi]

It fails with an error, which stops the process of syncing. I just figured out that I can check "ignore errors" in Comparison Settings to avoid that.

Btw., it seems to me that the "ignore errors" checkbox should be under the Synchronization Settings tab, not Comparison Settings. I never really knew what it meant before, like what kind of errors there would be during a comparison, and it's not explained in the manual.

[Zenju]

Btw., it seems to me that the "ignore errors" checkbox should be under the Synchronization Settings tab, not Comparison Settings. I never really knew what it meant before, like what kind of errors there would be during a comparison, and it's not explained in the manual.

"Ignore errors" applies to both comparison and synchronization. So not sure where else to put it.

[JohnHaggerty]

Last night I was backing up /home/john/live_files/* on my Linux Mint system by running a batch job which invokes FFS when, for the first time, I encountered:
Cannot open file
"/home/john/live_files/backups/misc_dot_entities/.config/opera/oauc_pipe".
Unsupported item type. [socket, 0140000]

The same error occurred for
/home/john/live_files/backups/misc_dot_entities/.config/opera/oauc_pipe_r.
Both socket files are five levels below the FFS start directory in the file hierarchy.

As there is no need to backup (and even less need to restore) socket files then deleting them before running FFS is a straightforward workaround.

The following BASH command deletes all socket files in the specified directory and all of its sub-directories -
find start_directory -type s -exec rm -r {} \;
e.g.
find /home/john/live_files/backups/misc_dot_entities -type s -exec rm -r {} \;

I hope someone finds this useful.

[Plerry]

There may be an alternative to removing socket files before the sync.

You can tell FreeFileSync (FFS) to not consider files for syncing via the FFS Exclude Filter.

You would need to identify a common, unique and available characteristic of your socket files, e.g. their file extension and/or (part of) the file-names, and add one or more suitable lines to your FFS Exclude Filter, possibly using wildcards.
Looking at your proficiency in BASH commands, that should likely not be too much of a problem for you.

[JohnHaggerty]

Your approach could work. However, I doubt that I can identify a common, unique and available characteristic of socket files, other than that they are socket files. And if the names and locations are not constant then, whenever they changed, the Exclude Filter(s) would need to be amended. And that's without dealing with Exclude Filter entries which become obsolete - how could you know which and when?

I'll be replacing my system drive shortly (boot, root & swap), so this was the first run of FFS to copy everything which isn't copied by Timeshift or my other FFS jobs - 'misc_dot_entities' contains copies of all of the hidden files and directories under my home directory.

Until the FFS run returned an error I wasn't aware that Opera leaves socket files lying about - nor under what circumstances, nor whether their names are constant. (The two files giving rise to the errors are dated Feb 2025 and Apr 2023.) And I've no idea what, if any, other socket files may be left by other bits of software in the near future.

Given the above, and the nature of socket files, I decided that deleting all of them was the best option for me, so I included the BASH command in the batch job script.

Other Linux users could paste it into a Terminal session and amend the start_directory. I imagine the situation for macOS users will be similar. I don't know whether the problem exists on Windows systems, nor how it might be addressed.