On 2026-02-26 23:03, [email protected] wrote:
Before that (attribution lost in post) Greg Wooledge wrote:
On Thursday, February 26, 2026 04:35:49 PM Stefan Monnier wrote:
> I find it much easier to get the commands right if I cd to the source
> directory first. With long and complicated pathnames, it can be
> easy to get confused about exactly which directory component(s) will be
> copied over, and which will only be traversed.
Aside: That does seem helpful!
FWIW, to avoid having to guess if `rsync my/foo your/bar` will end up
creating a `your/bar/foo` or not, I pretty much always pass to `rsync`
file names that end in `/.`, as in:
rsync -a my/foo/. your/bar/.
I find it much more robust than relying the subtle differences between
when file names end in `/` and when they don't, or when the target dir
already exists or not (which tend to bite me what I have to interrupt
an `rsync` and restart it again, since the target will usually exist
for the second run but not for the first).
It does require my creating `your/bar` manually beforehand, tho.
For anybody following along (or reading this in the future):
* rsync does have the same -x option that cp has (to stay on one
filesystem)
* this is the part where I think (but am not sure) that the behavior
differs
between cp and rsync (from man rsync on Wheezy ;-) :
`
A trailing slash on the source changes this behavior to avoid
creating an
additional directory level at the destination. You can think of a
trailing / on a source as meaning "copy the contents of this directory"
as
opposed to "copy the directory by name", but in both cases the
attributes of the containing directory are transferred to the
containing
directory on the destination. In other words, each of the
following
commands copies the files in the same way, including their setting of
the
attributes of /dest/foo:
rsync -av /src/foo /dest
rsync -av /src/foo/ /dest/foo
'
I think I do "cp -rp source target"
but usually open 2 instances of a file manager and drag or copy/paste if
on same file system.
mick
