Full, machine readable directory structure of a snapshot with one command line call

[chaquotay]

I'd like to retrieve a full, machine readable directory structure (directories and files) of a snapshots in as few command line calls as possible, ideally in one call.

Right now it looks like the only way to achieve this is to fetch the snapshot`s subtree id, and recursively walk through all the subtrees, resulting in one command line call per subtree id.

The restic ls command almost yields the information that I try to extract, but not in a machine readable format. So adding support for a machine readable format (natural choice: JSON, with the existing --json switch) to restic ls would fit my needs, but I'm open to other solutions.

[fd0]

Thanks for the suggestion, that's a good feature to add. In the meantime you can check if the find command does what you need:

$ restic find --json --snapshot latest '*'
[{"matches":[{"path":"/temp","permissions":"dr-xr-xr-x","type":"dir","mode":2147484013,"mtime":"2017-06-18T18:38:21.866621924+02:00","atime":"2017-06-18T18:38:21.866621824+02:00","ctime":"2017-06-18T18:38:21.86662189+02:00","uid":1000,"gid":100,"device_id":49},{"path":"/temp/file-3435842073965383672","permissions":"-rw-r--r--","type":"file","mode":420,"mtime":"1754-08-30T23:37:13.423622144+00:53","atime":"1754-08-30T23:37:13.423622144+00:53","ctime":"1754-08-30T23:37:13.423622144+00:53","uid":0,"gid":0,"device_id":49,"size":23866961497,"links":1}],"hits":2,"snapshot":"20e9c8f0326b9e0ffea8edef427ba1c01afdb944c8d8d5a0b68b0e37c0e2d53c"}]

The matches are even printed incrementally while restic is working, so you can see it also as a stream of results after the initial [{"matches": characters.

[fd0]

What's the desired output format? A huge JSON document (like the trees in the repo) with trees inserted instead of tree IDs? Or a sequence/array of tree objects with an additional attribute path?

[chaquotay]

At first glance the output of restic find looks promising, but it looks like it doesn't search recursively. Is that correct?

As for the desired output format for restic ls --json: a huge JSON document which reflects the directory structure of the snapshot would be great, since my use case is based on the tree structure. But I guess I could reconstruct the tree from an array with paths as well.

[fd0]

I'd prefer a sequence of trees, depth first or so, so the following program doesn't need to parse it all at once.

What's your use case btw? What are you building?

[chaquotay]

It's more of a ".NET research project", where I want to try newer things (compared to what I do at work), e.g. WPF or Nancy.

Basically it's a snapshot file browser, maybe remotely comparable to the existing fusemount, but for Windows and without the low level filesystem stuff, since I prefer to work with managed runtimes like the CLR or JVM. Right now it's an early prototype, but hopefully it will be usable someday and I'll release it as open-source.

[lloeki]

@chaquotay sounds interesting! That would definitely help with restic adoption for Windows folks over here.

[MichaelEischer]

This was implemented in #1953 which was included in restic 0.9.3. Just call restic ls --recursive --json latest.