> Perhaps a trailing "/" instead of training "/." is supposed to work. I do > not remember why I didn't start using it, but I am sure I would have tried
Quite possibly because you've been bitten by class cp/rcp; cp is not idempotent, in that if you "cp -r foo bar" where foo is a dir and bar doesn't exist, you end up with a bar that has the contents of foo (ie. foo/zot -> bar/zot) and if you do it twice, cp sees that bar is a dir and inserts it instead (so foo->bar/foo, foo/zot->bar/foo/zot.) TO make it worse, on BSD-ish systems, traditionally adding a trailing slash makes it treat bar as a directory (bar/ == bar/"" == bar/.), but under sysv-ish systems it doesn't change the interpretation (bar/ == bar, even if bar doesn't exist.) Partially *because* of this horror, rsync is (and is documented to be) consistent, and to have an explicit interpretation of trailing slash (that is consistent with bar/ == bar/. as far as destinations are concerned) and is independent of the existence of the destination, so you can expect it to do the same thing when run twice. This is one reason i'll often run rsync -a on local files rather than cp -r...
