Linux FTP Synch Utility

[Afasoas]

I use a linux virtual PC as a development platform for client website changes.
Now one client is using an SEO company who are directly editing the website.

What I'd like to do is run a single command that will automatically refresh my development copy of the website before I start a piece of work.

There's usually a short time period between my starting/completing website changes so I'm not too worried about overwriting the SEO companies changes when I re-upload - and I'm sure I can do a comparison between the live site and development site before I do upload.

Any thoughts/help from the panel?

[Greenbank]

rsync

And if you can't use that then lftp or ncftp have "mirror" modes that can do what you want.

[Oaky]

sitecopy might also fit the bill.

[David Martin]

Tell them to behave themselves and use a version control system like git.

[Afasoas]

Thank you

[vorsprung]

When I was faced with this kind of problem (about 10 years ago) I used to run a program called "tripwire" on the server.  This took a checksum of every file into a database and then reran the checksums once a day and emailed me if anything had changed.

Of course that was 10 years ago and nowadays things like git (like David Martin suggests) are more widely used

[Afasoas]

The simplest method seems to be using wget, which has a mirroring mode

http://www.howtoforge.com/using-wget-with-ftp-to-download-move-web-sites-recursively