Software Archeology Using Rsync

The most powerful tool in the knapsack of a software archeologist/maintainer, is the grep search. Unfortunately the signal-to-noise ratio for grep search results can often be quite low. This happens when the project source files are intermingled with other artifacts such as generated files, raw templates, library/framework documentation files and examples.

One trick to filtering out the noise is to define a shell script that uses Rsync to create/update a searchable shadow copy of the working folder, and then to search that copy…