Two-way Sync of Directories - how? (rsync?)

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2004, Kai Grossjohann wrote:
...
>Explaining the trailing slash is more difficult.  I just remember a
>rule of thumb: if you want to copy directories with rsync, always
>specify a trailing slash.  On both the source and the destination.  Of
>course, "man rsync" has the full story...

I find this is a bit tricky, and non-intuitive.  If I do:

rsync -var ./ system:dest/

Everything in the current directory is copied to the remote directory as it
appears in the current directory.

rsync -var subdir system:dest/

copies subdir to system:dest/subdir

rsunc -var subdir/ system:dest/

copies subdir/* to systems:dest

I often have use the ``-n'' option first to make sure it's going to do what
I want before doing the real transfer.

Incidently if one leaves off the trailing ``.'' for the destination when
copying from a remote system to the current directory, rsync will show what
it will copy if you have it set for verbose output, but won't do the copy.

rsync -vaP remote:/path/\*.sh

This will show which files it would copy

rsync -vaP remote:/path/\*.sh .

This will do the copy.

Bill
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