I've RTFM'd, and it looks like there is no way to get rsync to copy over symlinked directories as symlinks. E.g. I build Pale Moon browser from source for 3 machines at home. I prefer downloading the source once and symlinking to it from 3 different working directories. I also have a personal project where I analyze the same text data files in 3 different ways. It makes things so much simpler to use the same code, with different runtime parameters. So I symlink the main data directory to 3 working directories. Even "better" (or worse) I've got a situation where I symlink directories to... other symlinked directories. Yes; symlinks pointing to symlinks work, even for directories.
Unfortunately, rsync will not create a symlink where appropriate, but will de-reference the symlink, and duplicate multiple gigabytes of data needlessly. I eventually gave up trying, and made a tarball, and pushed it over to my "hot backup" machine, and extracted it there. That works OK for the initial setup, but is painfull for "minor incremental" updates. Am I missing something glaringly obvious, or is this a limitation of rsync? If so, is there another tool that can copy over symlinked directories properly? -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
