Commands

Overview

freebsd-rustdate has a variety of commands, some of which you’ll use regularly, and some rarely. See the individual command pages for details of using them and their options; many of them have a lot of options with a lot of detail available.

Basic Upgrading

In day-to-day use, you’ll be using fetch for updating to newer patchlevels of your current release, and upgrade for updating to newer releases. After doing the fetch or upgrade, you’ll use install to install the new changes.

Reviewing Or Preparing Installation

Once you’ve done a fetch or upgrade, you’ll have things staged up to install (assuming you weren’t already up-to-date of course). Running show-install will give you a summary of them, and can show more detail.

On an upgrade, there may be files that have merged in your local changes (config files in /etc are a common case). Running show-merges can show you the results of those merges. If conflicts are encountered, you’ll use resolve-merges to deal with them.

Checking For Updates

Running fetch is naturally one way of checking for updates. The check-fetch command does a quick check of your patchlevel against the server; this isn’t quite as thorough a check, but is much faster, much easier on your system, and much lighter weight on the freebsd-update server as well.

`cron`

The cron command, like the same-named command in freebsd-update, does the equivalent of a fetch attempt from cron and emails you when there’s something to do.

check-fetch also has a mode to run via cron; running it with the -qc options will have it quietly check, and only output something (which cron would then email you) when there looks to be an update ready.

Examining Your Current System

Strictly speaking, these are things not really related to upgrading per se.

The check-sys command lets you check what your system has against what freebsd-update thinks should be the current state. It’ll give you unhelp results if you’re not fetch’d up to the current patchlevel, doesn’t know anything about intentional local changes, etc. But it can be a useful way to check what’s different, and see if it’s what you expect. It can be used in a similar way to freebsd-update’s IDS command.

The extract command will let you surgically overwrite particular files with the “pristine” upstream versions.

Misc

complete can generate shell completion files.

Global Arguments

freebsd-rustdate takes some global args; see help for details. A few quick tidbits:

--config, --basedir, --workdir, --server, etc, are pretty much like you’d expect, and do the same sorta thing as their counterparts in freebsd-update. They override the values in the config file as necessary.
--jobs-cpu and --jobs-net control parallelism.

In this context, “CPU” also mostly covers “disk IO”, because they’re often intertwined. e.g., when scanning the current system, there’s disk IO in the form of stat()’s and walking directory trees, but also CPU work in the form of hashing the files.

Network mostly means doing the HTTP fetches. freebsd-update uses HTTP/1 pipelining on a single connection, which basically nobody else in the world supports. freebsd-rustdate uses multiple parallel fetchers. The default is probably reasonable. Maybe if you have a personal mirror that’s a huge bandwidth/delay product away, it’s worth cranking that number, but generally, I’d leave it be…

List

All commands, alphabetically.