On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 11:44 AM, Francis Gerund <ranrund at gmail.com> wrote: > > Hello. > > > > I think it is just too easy to make mistakes with rsync. And getting it > > "almost correct" can really get you hurt. > > What are you trying to do, and what kind of mistakes are you worried > about? The only things I find confusing are what the trailing / > means on a directory name and that -H isn't bundled with the other > options that -a includes that you normally want. You can avoid the > ambiguity of whether the top directory or just the contents will be > copied by cd'ing into the source directory and doing: > rsync -av . host:/path/to/dir. That is, by using '.' as the source > you can't mistakenly create another directory level on the target. > And you just have to remember that it will create the final directory > in the target path if it doesn't exist, but just the final one, not > the whole path. > The fact that you need a paragraph this long to describe how to avoid some of the confusion when using rsync pretty much speaks for itself. Rsync definitely has its own syntax and is much more sensitive than other unix tools, so it's not unwarranted that people might be confused. I don't know anyone who fully understands the include/exclude filters either, at least not without rereading the man page a few times. > And if you add -n or --dry-run to the options along with -v, it will > go through the motions and show you the files that would be > transferred without actually doing it. > > -- > Les Mikesell > lesmikesell at gmail.com > ❧ Brian Mathis @orev