freebsd-rustdate extract

This allows you use to freebsd-rustdate to extract pristine upstream versions of various files into place. This would be useful if you ran check-sys and it shows up differences you don’t want to exist. Or, say, you accidentally run rm /bin/ls; you can use this to re-download and re-extract that file.

n.b.: This is a very powerful and dangerous command, and it very much Does What You Say, with very few guardrails. Be extremely careful, and make liberal use of --dry-run!

In principle, you could even use this to install components you don’t have. e.g., you could freebsd-rustdate extract -x '^/usr/lib32' to install the 32-bit compat libs wholesale. This is probably not something you often want to do though, and is also probably a very inefficient way of doing things. But it’s an escape hatch if you don’t have a better way of doing something.

Pay attention to the help for this command. It’s very powerful, and also very dangerous. Worth noting:

• It does not by default try to filter down to the components you have installed; see the -c option. That’s because if you’re using this, you’re probably trying to do something tricky and manual, so it trusts you.

• By default it does compare against existing matching files, so should only do things that actually differ. Using -f will override that and make it touch everything that matches the given paths (or regexes), which can very quickly become very wide-reaching.

• Use --dry-run (-n) a lot to be sure this will do what you want before actually doing it.

• Did you use --dry-run? Use --dry-run!

See Also

You’d probably be doing a check-sys as part of most workflows where you’d ever use this.

Make sure you do a lot of --dry-run.