I am mainly talking about "Where will it copy/move these things anyway? I'd like to be sure before I commit. From reading the man page I have a good idea, but I'd like to see what the path names will look like first without actually doing anything."
And as a bonus: "I'm pretty much sure I can successfully cp/mv entire complicated tree A onto entire complicated tree B, but it would be great to know before I get started if deep inside B there is something that will cause some tiny part of the whole operation to fail." So no, cp --attributes-only can't help. And yes, indeed I see I am hoping that these rsync features will get added to cp and mv, and cpio too. (Or maybe just on the man pages mention: for "--dry-run" capabilities try rsync -n !.
