There is no standard across tools, not by a long shot. 

The meta data is simply S3 metadata.  I use the keys "owner", "group", and "permissions", and as contents store the numeric values for them as returned by stat.

It is becoming my medium-term vision to create a GUI interface of my own.  I like the idea of 's3fox' but it's a closed source tool and I think that's really hamstringing its development.  Missing some really important features...  But the benefit is that XUL and javascript are really easy to use, and everyone loves firefox!

I certainly haven't added any special handling for this.  I recommend you use auto rotation, and exclude anything in that dir that doesn't end with a dot+digit.

"compile a list" is a bit misleading.  It only keeps a partial list, the minimum of things needed in order to make sure the ordering will match up correctly.  Creating a whole list on drives with a lot of small files sometimes uses up all memory on the machine, so I don't do that.

Also this is already on the list of features to make someday.

I think the changes I made for --progress caused a lot of the error conditions I catch to be converted into "method_missing" errors.. thereby making a bunch of previously solved things happen again.

s3cmd doesn't (yet?) have the ability to do operations on that high a level.  It is really a very thin wrapper around s3 operations, much like the other "s3 shell" apps out there.

On unix-like systems where the ruby permissions and ownership methods work, those data are preserved.  I don't preserve timestamps.

Fair enough.  This didn't seem like something important back when it was only 2 files 

You can't specify the option multiple times.  You have to make a regex for it.

"(?:crit1|crit2|etcetc)"

depending on your shell: make sure it's not eating or mangling the characters inside the quotes.

We haven't been able to repro the slowness, so there's nothing "solved" per se.

I just need to get around to making an option for that.

Yes, 1000-per is a limitation of S3, but there's no reason why I can't code the tool to work with that and still display a unified output.

This topic has been moved to Feature Requests.

http://s3sync.net/forum/index.php?topic=46.0

Nope.  You can craft a regular expression to ignore dirs though.  See other posts on "exclude".

Buffering of line output is probably controlled by your shell (that's what's hooking up the things together via the '>' operator)

Nope you're fine.  Are you sure it's "processing" them, or just making a node for the directory and then skipping its contents?  Because that's what your regex is telling it to do.

If you want to skip the folder itself, as well as its contents, you should trail with /|$  instead of just /
(that's "slash, or the end of the string")