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Is there a way to pause rsync via command line, if it transfers data for over X minutes? I'm working on using it as a backup and would like it to pause every once in a while to prevent the hard disks from overheating or network throttling. I am currently using a Windows batch file to start a Linux bash script via cygwin to do this.

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So, you cannot run rsync as a daemon, to utilize the --bwlimit switch)? –  Christopher Jan 18 '13 at 2:26
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@Christopher You do not need to run rsync as a daemon to use the --bwlimit switch. –  jordanm Jan 18 '13 at 3:36
    
Pausing a network command is tricky, you will likely run into timeouts. –  scai Jan 18 '13 at 7:11
    
@jordanm Thanks! Just because I read it under the DAEMON OPTIONS does not mean that it is exclusive to daemon mode. –  Christopher Jan 18 '13 at 13:46

1 Answer 1

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If you can get the PID of the process, you can use

kill –STOPpid

to pause the process, and

kill –CONTpid

to resume it.  Check the exit status; if the kill command fails, the first assumption is that the process no longer exists (because it has finished).

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If you have one rsync instance running, you can get the PID by ps | command grep rsync | awk '{print $1}'. You can run your command in a while script with a sleep function in between. –  Bernhard Jan 18 '13 at 6:40
    
Note however that if you pause rsync for too long, its TCP connection will eventually time out. How long you have depends on how intermediate firewalls are configured. –  Gilles Jan 18 '13 at 23:17

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