rsync(1) rsync(1)
rsync - a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool
Local: rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [DEST]
Access via remote shell:
Pull: rsync [OPTION...] [USER@]HOST:SRC... [DEST]
Push: rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [USER@]HOST:DEST
Access via rsync daemon:
Pull: rsync [OPTION...] [USER@]HOST::SRC... [DEST]
rsync [OPTION...] rsync://[USER@]HOST[:PORT]/SRC... [DEST]
Push: rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [USER@]HOST::DEST
rsync [OPTION...] SRC... rsync://[USER@]HOST[:PORT]/DEST
Usages with just one SRC arg and no DEST arg will list the source
files instead of copying.
Rsync is a fast and extraordinarily versatile file copying tool. It
can copy locally, to/from another host over any remote shell, or
to/from a remote rsync daemon. It offers a large number of options
that control every aspect of its behavior and permit very flexible
specification of the set of files to be copied. It is famous for its
delta-transfer algorithm, which reduces the amount of data sent over
the network by sending only the differences between the source files
and the existing files in the destination. Rsync is widely used for
backups and mirroring and as an improved copy command for everyday
use.
Rsync finds files that need to be transferred using a "quick check"
algorithm (by default) that looks for files that have changed in size
or in last-modified time. Any changes in the other preserved
attributes (as requested by options) are made on the destination file
directly when the quick check indicates that the file’s data does not
need to be updated.
Some of the additional features of rsync are:
o support for copying links, devices, owners, groups, and
permissions
o exclude and exclude-from options similar to GNU tar
o a CVS exclude mode for ignoring the same files that CVS would
ignore
o can use any transparent remote shell, including ssh or rsh
o does not require super-user privileges
o pipelining of file transfers to minimize latency costs
o support for anonymous or authenticated rsync daemons (ideal
for mirroring)
Rsync copies files either to or from a remote host, or locally on the
current host (it does not support copying files between two remote
hosts).
There are two different ways for rsync to contact a remote system:
using a remote-shell program as the transport (such as ssh or rsh) or
contacting an rsync daemon directly via TCP. The remote-shell
transport is used whenever the source or destination path contains a
single colon (:) separator after a host specification. Contacting an
rsync daemon directly happens when the source or destination path
contains a double colon (::) separator after a host specification, OR
when an rsync:// URL is specified (see also the "USING RSYNC-DAEMON
FEATURES VIA A REMOTE-SHELL CONNECTION" section for an exception to
this latter rule).
As a special case, if a single source arg is specified without a
destination, the files are listed in an output format similar to "ls
-l".
As expected, if neither the source or destination path specify a
remote host, the copy occurs locally (see also the --list-only
option).
Rsync refers to the local side as the "client" and the remote side as
the "server". Don’t confuse "server" with an rsync daemon -- a
daemon is always a server, but a server can be either a daemon or a
remote-shell spawned process.
See the file README for installation instructions.
Once installed, you can use rsync to any machine that you can access
via a remote shell (as well as some that you can access using the
rsync daemon-mode protocol). For remote transfers, a modern rsync
uses ssh for its communications, but it may have been configured to
use a different remote shell by default, such as rsh or remsh.
You can also specify any remote shell you like, either by using the
-e command line option, or by setting the RSYNC_RSH environment
variable.
Note that rsync must be installed on both the source and destination
machines.
You use rsync in the same way you use rcp. You must specify a source
and a destination, one of which may be remote.
Perhaps the best way to explain the syntax is with some examples:
rsync -t *.c foo:src/
This would transfer all files matching the pattern *.c from the
current directory to the directory src on the machine foo. If any of
the files already exist on the remote system then the rsync
remote-update protocol is used to update the file by sending only the
differences in the data. Note that the expansion of wildcards on the
commandline (*.c) into a list of files is handled by the shell before
it runs rsync and not by rsync itself (exactly the same as all other
posix-style programs).
rsync -avz foo:src/bar /data/tmp
This would recursively transfer all files from the directory src/bar
on the machine foo into the /data/tmp/bar directory on the local
machine. The files are transferred in "archive" mode, which ensures
that symbolic links, devices, attributes, permissions, ownerships,
etc. are preserved in the transfer. Additionally, compression will
be used to reduce the size of data portions of the transfer.
rsync -avz foo:src/bar/ /data/tmp
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
Note also that host and module references don’t require a trailing
slash to copy the contents of the default directory. For example,
both of these copy the remote directory’s contents into "/dest":
rsync -av host: /dest
rsync -av host::module /dest
You can also use rsync in local-only mode, where both the source and
destination don’t have a ’:’ in the name. In this case it behaves
like an improved copy command.
Finally, you can list all the (listable) modules available from a
particular rsync daemon by leaving off the module name:
rsync somehost.mydomain.com::
See the following section for more details.
The syntax for requesting multiple files from a remote host is done
by specifying additional remote-host args in the same style as the
first, or with the hostname omitted. For instance, all these work:
rsync -av host:file1 :file2 host:file{3,4} /dest/
rsync -av host::modname/file{1,2} host::modname/file3 /dest/
rsync -av host::modname/file1 ::modname/file{3,4}
Older versions of rsync required using quoted spaces in the SRC, like
these examples:
rsync -av host:'dir1/file1 dir2/file2' /dest
rsync host::'modname/dir1/file1 modname/dir2/file2' /dest
This word-splitting still works (by default) in the latest rsync, but
is not as easy to use as the first method.
If you need to transfer a filename that contains whitespace, you can
either specify the --protect-args (-s) option, or you’ll need to
escape the whitespace in a way that the remote shell will understand.
For instance:
rsync -av host:'file\ name\ with\ spaces' /dest
It is also possible to use rsync without a remote shell as the
transport. In this case you will directly connect to a remote rsync
daemon, typically using TCP port 873. (This obviously requires the
daemon to be running on the remote system, so refer to the STARTING
AN RSYNC DAEMON TO ACCEPT CONNECTIONS section below for information
on that.)
Using rsync in this way is the same as using it with a remote shell
except that:
o you either use a double colon :: instead of a single colon to
separate the hostname from the path, or you use an rsync://
URL.
o the first word of the "path" is actually a module name.
o the remote daemon may print a message of the day when you
connect.
o if you specify no path name on the remote daemon then the list
of accessible paths on the daemon will be shown.
o if you specify no local destination then a listing of the
specified files on the remote daemon is provided.
o you must not specify the --rsh (-e) option.
An example that copies all the files in a remote module named "src":
rsync -av host::src /dest
Some modules on the remote daemon may require authentication. If so,
you will receive a password prompt when you connect. You can avoid
the password prompt by setting the environment variable
RSYNC_PASSWORD to the password you want to use or using the
--password-file option. This may be useful when scripting rsync.
WARNING: On some systems environment variables are visible to all
users. On those systems using --password-file is recommended.
You may establish the connection via a web proxy by setting the
environment variable RSYNC_PROXY to a hostname:port pair pointing to
your web proxy. Note that your web proxy’s configuration must
support proxy connections to port 873.
You may also establish a daemon connection using a program as a proxy
by setting the environment variable RSYNC_CONNECT_PROG to the
commands you wish to run in place of making a direct socket
connection. The string may contain the escape "%H" to represent the
hostname specified in the rsync command (so use "%%" if you need a
single "%" in your string). For example:
export RSYNC_CONNECT_PROG='ssh proxyhost nc %H 873'
rsync -av targethost1::module/src/ /dest/
rsync -av rsync:://targethost2/module/src/ /dest/
The command specified above uses ssh to run nc (netcat) on a
proxyhost, which forwards all data to port 873 (the rsync daemon) on
the targethost (%H).
It is sometimes useful to use various features of an rsync daemon
(such as named modules) without actually allowing any new socket
connections into a system (other than what is already required to
allow remote-shell access). Rsync supports connecting to a host
using a remote shell and then spawning a single-use "daemon" server
that expects to read its config file in the home dir of the remote
user. This can be useful if you want to encrypt a daemon-style
transfer’s data, but since the daemon is started up fresh by the
remote user, you may not be able to use features such as chroot or
change the uid used by the daemon. (For another way to encrypt a
daemon transfer, consider using ssh to tunnel a local port to a
remote machine and configure a normal rsync daemon on that remote
host to only allow connections from "localhost".)
From the user’s perspective, a daemon transfer via a remote-shell
connection uses nearly the same command-line syntax as a normal
rsync-daemon transfer, with the only exception being that you must
explicitly set the remote shell program on the command-line with the
--rsh=COMMAND option. (Setting the RSYNC_RSH in the environment will
not turn on this functionality.) For example:
rsync -av --rsh=ssh host::module /dest
If you need to specify a different remote-shell user, keep in mind
that the user@ prefix in front of the host is specifying the
rsync-user value (for a module that requires user-based
authentication). This means that you must give the ’-l user’ option
to ssh when specifying the remote-shell, as in this example that uses
the short version of the --rsh option:
rsync -av -e "ssh -l ssh-user" rsync-user@host::module /dest
The "ssh-user" will be used at the ssh level; the "rsync-user" will
be used to log-in to the "module".
In order to connect to an rsync daemon, the remote system needs to
have a daemon already running (or it needs to have configured
something like inetd to spawn an rsync daemon for incoming
connections on a particular port). For full information on how to
start a daemon that will handling incoming socket connections, see
the rsyncd.conf(5) man page -- that is the config file for the
daemon, and it contains the full details for how to run the daemon
(including stand-alone and inetd configurations).
If you’re using one of the remote-shell transports for the transfer,
there is no need to manually start an rsync daemon.
Rsync always sorts the specified filenames into its internal transfer
list. This handles the merging together of the contents of
identically named directories, makes it easy to remove duplicate
filenames, and may confuse someone when the files are transferred in
a different order than what was given on the command-line.
If you need a particular file to be transferred prior to another,
either separate the files into different rsync calls, or consider
using --delay-updates (which doesn’t affect the sorted transfer
order, but does make the final file-updating phase happen much more
rapidly).
Here are some examples of how I use rsync.
To backup my wife’s home directory, which consists of large MS Word
files and mail folders, I use a cron job that runs
rsync -Cavz . arvidsjaur:backup
each night over a PPP connection to a duplicate directory on my
machine "arvidsjaur".
To synchronize my samba source trees I use the following Makefile
targets:
get:
rsync -avuzb --exclude '*~' samba:samba/ .
put:
rsync -Cavuzb . samba:samba/
sync: get put
this allows me to sync with a CVS directory at the other end of the
connection. I then do CVS operations on the remote machine, which
saves a lot of time as the remote CVS protocol isn’t very efficient.
I mirror a directory between my "old" and "new" ftp sites with the
command:
rsync -az -e ssh --delete ~ftp/pub/samba nimbus:"~ftp/pub/tridge"
This is launched from cron every few hours.
Here is a short summary of the options available in rsync. Please
refer to the detailed description below for a complete description.
-v, --verbose increase verbosity
--info=FLAGS fine-grained informational verbosity
--debug=FLAGS fine-grained debug verbosity
--msgs2stderr special output handling for debugging
-q, --quiet suppress non-error messages
--no-motd suppress daemon-mode MOTD (see caveat)
-c, --checksum skip based on checksum, not mod-time & size
-a, --archive archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X)
--no-OPTION turn off an implied OPTION (e.g. --no-D)
-r, --recursive recurse into directories
-R, --relative use relative path names
--no-implied-dirs don't send implied dirs with --relative
-b, --backup make backups (see --suffix & --backup-dir)
--backup-dir=DIR make backups into hierarchy based in DIR
--suffix=SUFFIX backup suffix (default ~ w/o --backup-dir)
-u, --update skip files that are newer on the receiver
--inplace update destination files in-place
--append append data onto shorter files
--append-verify --append w/old data in file checksum
-d, --dirs transfer directories without recursing
-l, --links copy symlinks as symlinks
-L, --copy-links transform symlink into referent file/dir
--copy-unsafe-links only "unsafe" symlinks are transformed
--safe-links ignore symlinks that point outside the tree
--munge-links munge symlinks to make them safer
-k, --copy-dirlinks transform symlink to dir into referent dir
-K, --keep-dirlinks treat symlinked dir on receiver as dir
-H, --hard-links preserve hard links
-p, --perms preserve permissions
-E, --executability preserve executability
--chmod=CHMOD affect file and/or directory permissions
-A, --acls preserve ACLs (implies -p)
-X, --xattrs preserve extended attributes
-o, --owner preserve owner (super-user only)
-g, --group preserve group
--devices preserve device files (super-user only)
--specials preserve special files
-D same as --devices --specials
-t, --times preserve modification times
-O, --omit-dir-times omit directories from --times
-J, --omit-link-times omit symlinks from --times
--super receiver attempts super-user activities
--fake-super store/recover privileged attrs using xattrs
-S, --sparse turn sequences of nulls into sparse blocks
--preallocate allocate dest files before writing
-n, --dry-run perform a trial run with no changes made
-W, --whole-file copy files whole (w/o delta-xfer algorithm)
--checksum-choice=STR choose the checksum algorithms
-x, --one-file-system don't cross filesystem boundaries
-B, --block-size=SIZE force a fixed checksum block-size
-e, --rsh=COMMAND specify the remote shell to use
--rsync-path=PROGRAM specify the rsync to run on remote machine
--existing skip creating new files on receiver
--ignore-existing skip updating files that exist on receiver
--remove-source-files sender removes synchronized files (non-dir)
--del an alias for --delete-during
--delete delete extraneous files from dest dirs
--delete-before receiver deletes before xfer, not during
--delete-during receiver deletes during the transfer
--delete-delay find deletions during, delete after
--delete-after receiver deletes after transfer, not during
--delete-excluded also delete excluded files from dest dirs
--ignore-missing-args ignore missing source args without error
--delete-missing-args delete missing source args from destination
--ignore-errors delete even if there are I/O errors
--force force deletion of dirs even if not empty
--max-delete=NUM don't delete more than NUM files
--max-size=SIZE don't transfer any file larger than SIZE
--min-size=SIZE don't transfer any file smaller than SIZE
--partial keep partially transferred files
--partial-dir=DIR put a partially transferred file into DIR
--delay-updates put all updated files into place at end
-m, --prune-empty-dirs prune empty directory chains from file-list
--numeric-ids don't map uid/gid values by user/group name
--usermap=STRING custom username mapping
--groupmap=STRING custom groupname mapping
--chown=USER:GROUP simple username/groupname mapping
--timeout=SECONDS set I/O timeout in seconds
--contimeout=SECONDS set daemon connection timeout in seconds
-I, --ignore-times don't skip files that match size and time
--size-only skip files that match in size
-@, --modify-window=NUM set the accuracy for mod-time comparisons
-T, --temp-dir=DIR create temporary files in directory DIR
-y, --fuzzy find similar file for basis if no dest file
--compare-dest=DIR also compare received files relative to DIR
--copy-dest=DIR ... and include copies of unchanged files
--link-dest=DIR hardlink to files in DIR when unchanged
-z, --compress compress file data during the transfer
--compress-level=NUM explicitly set compression level
--skip-compress=LIST skip compressing files with suffix in LIST
-C, --cvs-exclude auto-ignore files in the same way CVS does
-f, --filter=RULE add a file-filtering RULE
-F same as --filter='dir-merge /.rsync-filter'
repeated: --filter='- .rsync-filter'
--exclude=PATTERN exclude files matching PATTERN
--exclude-from=FILE read exclude patterns from FILE
--include=PATTERN don't exclude files matching PATTERN
--include-from=FILE read include patterns from FILE
--files-from=FILE read list of source-file names from FILE
-0, --from0 all *from/filter files are delimited by 0s
-s, --protect-args no space-splitting; wildcard chars only
--address=ADDRESS bind address for outgoing socket to daemon
--port=PORT specify double-colon alternate port number
--sockopts=OPTIONS specify custom TCP options
--blocking-io use blocking I/O for the remote shell
--outbuf=N|L|B set out buffering to None, Line, or Block
--stats give some file-transfer stats
-8, --8-bit-output leave high-bit chars unescaped in output
-h, --human-readable output numbers in a human-readable format
--progress show progress during transfer
-P same as --partial --progress
-i, --itemize-changes output a change-summary for all updates
-M, --remote-option=OPTION send OPTION to the remote side only
--out-format=FORMAT output updates using the specified FORMAT
--log-file=FILE log what we're doing to the specified FILE
--log-file-format=FMT log updates using the specified FMT
--password-file=FILE read daemon-access password from FILE
--list-only list the files instead of copying them
--bwlimit=RATE limit socket I/O bandwidth
--write-batch=FILE write a batched update to FILE
--only-write-batch=FILE like --write-batch but w/o updating dest
--read-batch=FILE read a batched update from FILE
--protocol=NUM force an older protocol version to be used
--iconv=CONVERT_SPEC request charset conversion of filenames
--checksum-seed=NUM set block/file checksum seed (advanced)
-4, --ipv4 prefer IPv4
-6, --ipv6 prefer IPv6
--version print version number
(-h) --help show this help (see below for -h comment)
Rsync can also be run as a daemon, in which case the following
options are accepted:
--daemon run as an rsync daemon
--address=ADDRESS bind to the specified address
--bwlimit=RATE limit socket I/O bandwidth
--config=FILE specify alternate rsyncd.conf file
-M, --dparam=OVERRIDE override global daemon config parameter
--no-detach do not detach from the parent
--port=PORT listen on alternate port number
--log-file=FILE override the "log file" setting
--log-file-format=FMT override the "log format" setting
--sockopts=OPTIONS specify custom TCP options
-v, --verbose increase verbosity
-4, --ipv4 prefer IPv4
-6, --ipv6 prefer IPv6
-h, --help show this help (if used after --daemon)
Rsync accepts both long (double-dash + word) and short (single-dash +
letter) options. The full list of the available options are
described below. If an option can be specified in more than one way,
the choices are comma-separated. Some options only have a long
variant, not a short. If the option takes a parameter, the parameter
is only listed after the long variant, even though it must also be
specified for the short. When specifying a parameter, you can either
use the form --option=param or replace the ’=’ with whitespace. The
parameter may need to be quoted in some manner for it to survive the
shell’s command-line parsing. Keep in mind that a leading tilde (~)
in a filename is substituted by your shell, so --option=~/foo will
not change the tilde into your home directory (remove the ’=’ for
that).
--help Print a short help page describing the options available in
rsync and exit. For backward-compatibility with older
versions of rsync, the help will also be output if you use the
-h option without any other args.
--version
print the rsync version number and exit.
-v, --verbose
This option increases the amount of information you are given
during the transfer. By default, rsync works silently. A
single -v will give you information about what files are being
transferred and a brief summary at the end. Two -v options
will give you information on what files are being skipped and
slightly more information at the end. More than two -v options
should only be used if you are debugging rsync.
In a modern rsync, the -v option is equivalent to the setting
of groups of --info and --debug options. You can choose to
use these newer options in addition to, or in place of using
--verbose, as any fine-grained settings override the implied
settings of -v. Both --info and --debug have a way to ask for
help that tells you exactly what flags are set for each
increase in verbosity.
However, do keep in mind that a daemon’s "max verbosity"
setting will limit how high of a level the various individual
flags can be set on the daemon side. For instance, if the max
is 2, then any info and/or debug flag that is set to a higher
value than what would be set by -vv will be downgraded to the
-vv level in the daemon’s logging.
--info=FLAGS
This option lets you have fine-grained control over the
information output you want to see. An individual flag name
may be followed by a level number, with 0 meaning to silence
that output, 1 being the default output level, and higher
numbers increasing the output of that flag (for those that
support higher levels). Use --info=help to see all the
available flag names, what they output, and what flag names
are added for each increase in the verbose level. Some
examples:
rsync -a --info=progress2 src/ dest/
rsync -avv --info=stats2,misc1,flist0 src/ dest/
Note that --info=name’s output is affected by the --out-format
and --itemize-changes (-i) options. See those options for
more information on what is output and when.
This option was added to 3.1.0, so an older rsync on the
server side might reject your attempts at fine-grained control
(if one or more flags needed to be send to the server and the
server was too old to understand them). See also the "max
verbosity" caveat above when dealing with a daemon.
--debug=FLAGS
This option lets you have fine-grained control over the debug
output you want to see. An individual flag name may be
followed by a level number, with 0 meaning to silence that
output, 1 being the default output level, and higher numbers
increasing the output of that flag (for those that support
higher levels). Use --debug=help to see all the available
flag names, what they output, and what flag names are added
for each increase in the verbose level. Some examples:
rsync -avvv --debug=none src/ dest/
rsync -avA --del --debug=del2,acl src/ dest/
Note that some debug messages will only be output when
--msgs2stderr is specified, especially those pertaining to I/O
and buffer debugging.
This option was added to 3.1.0, so an older rsync on the
server side might reject your attempts at fine-grained control
(if one or more flags needed to be send to the server and the
server was too old to understand them). See also the "max
verbosity" caveat above when dealing with a daemon.
--msgs2stderr
This option changes rsync to send all its output directly to
stderr rather than to send messages to the client side via the
protocol (which normally outputs info messages via stdout).
This is mainly intended for debugging in order to avoid
changing the data sent via the protocol, since the extra
protocol data can change what is being tested. The option
does not affect the remote side of a transfer without using
--remote-option -- e.g. -M--msgs2stderr. Also keep in mind
that a daemon connection does not have a stderr channel to
send messages back to the client side, so if you are doing any
daemon-transfer debugging using this option, you should start
up a daemon using --no-detach so that you can see the stderr
output on the daemon side.
This option has the side-effect of making stderr output get
line-buffered so that the merging of the output of 3 programs
happens in a more readable manner.
-q, --quiet
This option decreases the amount of information you are given
during the transfer, notably suppressing information messages
from the remote server. This option is useful when invoking
rsync from cron.
--no-motd
This option affects the information that is output by the
client at the start of a daemon transfer. This suppresses the
message-of-the-day (MOTD) text, but it also affects the list
of modules that the daemon sends in response to the "rsync
host::" request (due to a limitation in the rsync protocol),
so omit this option if you want to request the list of modules
from the daemon.
-I, --ignore-times
Normally rsync will skip any files that are already the same
size and have the same modification timestamp. This option
turns off this "quick check" behavior, causing all files to be
updated.
--size-only
This modifies rsync’s "quick check" algorithm for finding
files that need to be transferred, changing it from the
default of transferring files with either a changed size or a
changed last-modified time to just looking for files that have
changed in size. This is useful when starting to use rsync
after using another mirroring system which may not preserve
timestamps exactly.
-@, --modify-window
When comparing two timestamps, rsync treats the timestamps as
being equal if they differ by no more than the modify-window
value. The default is 0, which matches just integer seconds.
If you specify a negative value (and the receiver is at least
version 3.1.3) then nanoseconds will also be taken into
account. Specifying 1 is useful for copies to/from MS Windows
FAT filesystems, because FAT represents times with a 2-second
resolution (allowing times to differ from the original by up
to 1 second).
If you want all your transfers to default to comparing
nanoseconds, you can create a ~/.popt file and put these lines
in it:
rsync alias -a -a@-1
rsync alias -t -t@-1
With that as the default, you’d need to specify
--modify-window=0 (aka -@0) to override it and ignore
nanoseconds, e.g. if you’re copying between ext3 and ext4, or
if the receiving rsync is older than 3.1.3.
-c, --checksum
This changes the way rsync checks if the files have been
changed and are in need of a transfer. Without this option,
rsync uses a "quick check" that (by default) checks if each
file’s size and time of last modification match between the
sender and receiver. This option changes this to compare a
128-bit checksum for each file that has a matching size.
Generating the checksums means that both sides will expend a
lot of disk I/O reading all the data in the files in the
transfer (and this is prior to any reading that will be done
to transfer changed files), so this can slow things down
significantly.
The sending side generates its checksums while it is doing the
file-system scan that builds the list of the available files.
The receiver generates its checksums when it is scanning for
changed files, and will checksum any file that has the same
size as the corresponding sender’s file: files with either a
changed size or a changed checksum are selected for transfer.
Note that rsync always verifies that each transferred file was
correctly reconstructed on the receiving side by checking a
whole-file checksum that is generated as the file is
transferred, but that automatic after-the-transfer
verification has nothing to do with this option’s
before-the-transfer "Does this file need to be updated?"
check.
For protocol 30 and beyond (first supported in 3.0.0), the
checksum used is MD5. For older protocols, the checksum used
is MD4.
-a, --archive
This is equivalent to -rlptgoD. It is a quick way of saying
you want recursion and want to preserve almost everything
(with -H being a notable omission). The only exception to the
above equivalence is when --files-from is specified, in which
case -r is not implied.
Note that -a does not preserve hardlinks, because finding
multiply-linked files is expensive. You must separately
specify -H.
--no-OPTION
You may turn off one or more implied options by prefixing the
option name with "no-". Not all options may be prefixed with
a "no-": only options that are implied by other options (e.g.
--no-D, --no-perms) or have different defaults in various
circumstances (e.g. --no-whole-file, --no-blocking-io,
--no-dirs). You may specify either the short or the long
option name after the "no-" prefix (e.g. --no-R is the same as
--no-relative).
For example: if you want to use -a (--archive) but don’t want
-o (--owner), instead of converting -a into -rlptgD, you could
specify -a --no-o (or -a --no-owner).
The order of the options is important: if you specify --no-r
-a, the -r option would end up being turned on, the opposite
of -a --no-r. Note also that the side-effects of the
--files-from option are NOT positional, as it affects the
default state of several options and slightly changes the
meaning of -a (see the --files-from option for more details).
-r, --recursive
This tells rsync to copy directories recursively. See also
--dirs (-d).
Beginning with rsync 3.0.0, the recursive algorithm used is
now an incremental scan that uses much less memory than before
and begins the transfer after the scanning of the first few
directories have been completed. This incremental scan only
affects our recursion algorithm, and does not change a
non-recursive transfer. It is also only possible when both
ends of the transfer are at least version 3.0.0.
Some options require rsync to know the full file list, so
these options disable the incremental recursion mode. These
include: --delete-before, --delete-after, --prune-empty-dirs,
and --delay-updates. Because of this, the default delete mode
when you specify --delete is now --delete-during when both
ends of the connection are at least 3.0.0 (use --del or
--delete-during to request this improved deletion mode
explicitly). See also the --delete-delay option that is a
better choice than using --delete-after.
Incremental recursion can be disabled using the
--no-inc-recursive option or its shorter --no-i-r alias.
-R, --relative
Use relative paths. This means that the full path names
specified on the command line are sent to the server rather
than just the last parts of the filenames. This is
particularly useful when you want to send several different
directories at the same time. For example, if you used this
command:
rsync -av /foo/bar/baz.c remote:/tmp/
... this would create a file named baz.c in /tmp/ on the
remote machine. If instead you used
rsync -avR /foo/bar/baz.c remote:/tmp/
then a file named /tmp/foo/bar/baz.c would be created on the
remote machine, preserving its full path. These extra path
elements are called "implied directories" (i.e. the "foo" and
the "foo/bar" directories in the above example).
Beginning with rsync 3.0.0, rsync always sends these implied
directories as real directories in the file list, even if a
path element is really a symlink on the sending side. This
prevents some really unexpected behaviors when copying the
full path of a file that you didn’t realize had a symlink in
its path. If you want to duplicate a server-side symlink,
include both the symlink via its path, and referent directory
via its real path. If you’re dealing with an older rsync on
the sending side, you may need to use the --no-implied-dirs
option.
It is also possible to limit the amount of path information
that is sent as implied directories for each path you specify.
With a modern rsync on the sending side (beginning with
2.6.7), you can insert a dot and a slash into the source path,
like this:
rsync -avR /foo/./bar/baz.c remote:/tmp/
That would create /tmp/bar/baz.c on the remote machine. (Note
that the dot must be followed by a slash, so "/foo/." would
not be abbreviated.) For older rsync versions, you would need
to use a chdir to limit the source path. For example, when
pushing files:
(cd /foo; rsync -avR bar/baz.c remote:/tmp/)
(Note that the parens put the two commands into a sub-shell,
so that the "cd" command doesn’t remain in effect for future
commands.) If you’re pulling files from an older rsync, use
this idiom (but only for a non-daemon transfer):
rsync -avR --rsync-path="cd /foo; rsync" \
remote:bar/baz.c /tmp/
--no-implied-dirs
This option affects the default behavior of the --relative
option. When it is specified, the attributes of the implied
directories from the source names are not included in the
transfer. This means that the corresponding path elements on
the destination system are left unchanged if they exist, and
any missing implied directories are created with default
attributes. This even allows these implied path elements to
have big differences, such as being a symlink to a directory
on the receiving side.
For instance, if a command-line arg or a files-from entry told
rsync to transfer the file "path/foo/file", the directories
"path" and "path/foo" are implied when --relative is used. If
"path/foo" is a symlink to "bar" on the destination system,
the receiving rsync would ordinarily delete "path/foo",
recreate it as a directory, and receive the file into the new
directory. With --no-implied-dirs, the receiving rsync
updates "path/foo/file" using the existing path elements,
which means that the file ends up being created in "path/bar".
Another way to accomplish this link preservation is to use the
--keep-dirlinks option (which will also affect symlinks to
directories in the rest of the transfer).
When pulling files from an rsync older than 3.0.0, you may
need to use this option if the sending side has a symlink in
the path you request and you wish the implied directories to
be transferred as normal directories.
-b, --backup
With this option, preexisting destination files are renamed as
each file is transferred or deleted. You can control where
the backup file goes and what (if any) suffix gets appended
using the --backup-dir and --suffix options.
Note that if you don’t specify --backup-dir, (1) the
--omit-dir-times option will be forced on, and (2) if --delete
is also in effect (without --delete-excluded), rsync will add
a "protect" filter-rule for the backup suffix to the end of
all your existing excludes (e.g. -f "P *~"). This will
prevent previously backed-up files from being deleted. Note
that if you are supplying your own filter rules, you may need
to manually insert your own exclude/protect rule somewhere
higher up in the list so that it has a high enough priority to
be effective (e.g., if your rules specify a trailing
inclusion/exclusion of ’*’, the auto-added rule would never be
reached).
--backup-dir=DIR
In combination with the --backup option, this tells rsync to
store all backups in the specified directory on the receiving
side. This can be used for incremental backups. You can
additionally specify a backup suffix using the --suffix option
(otherwise the files backed up in the specified directory will
keep their original filenames).
Note that if you specify a relative path, the backup directory
will be relative to the destination directory, so you probably
want to specify either an absolute path or a path that starts
with "../". If an rsync daemon is the receiver, the backup
dir cannot go outside the module’s path hierarchy, so take
extra care not to delete it or copy into it.
--suffix=SUFFIX
This option allows you to override the default backup suffix
used with the --backup (-b) option. The default suffix is a ~
if no --backup-dir was specified, otherwise it is an empty
string.
-u, --update
This forces rsync to skip any files which exist on the
destination and have a modified time that is newer than the
source file. (If an existing destination file has a
modification time equal to the source file’s, it will be
updated if the sizes are different.)
Note that this does not affect the copying of dirs, symlinks,
or other special files. Also, a difference of file format
between the sender and receiver is always considered to be
important enough for an update, no matter what date is on the
objects. In other words, if the source has a directory where
the destination has a file, the transfer would occur
regardless of the timestamps.
This option is a transfer rule, not an exclude, so it doesn’t
affect the data that goes into the file-lists, and thus it
doesn’t affect deletions. It just limits the files that the
receiver requests to be transferred.
--inplace
This option changes how rsync transfers a file when its data
needs to be updated: instead of the default method of creating
a new copy of the file and moving it into place when it is
complete, rsync instead writes the updated data directly to
the destination file.
This has several effects:
o Hard links are not broken. This means the new data
will be visible through other hard links to the
destination file. Moreover, attempts to copy differing
source files onto a multiply-linked destination file
will result in a "tug of war" with the destination data
changing back and forth.
o In-use binaries cannot be updated (either the OS will
prevent this from happening, or binaries that attempt
to swap-in their data will misbehave or crash).
o The file’s data will be in an inconsistent state during
the transfer and will be left that way if the transfer
is interrupted or if an update fails.
o A file that rsync cannot write to cannot be updated.
While a super user can update any file, a normal user
needs to be granted write permission for the open of
the file for writing to be successful.
o The efficiency of rsync’s delta-transfer algorithm may
be reduced if some data in the destination file is
overwritten before it can be copied to a position later
in the file. This does not apply if you use --backup,
since rsync is smart enough to use the backup file as
the basis file for the transfer.
WARNING: you should not use this option to update files that
are being accessed by others, so be careful when choosing to
use this for a copy.
This option is useful for transferring large files with
block-based changes or appended data, and also on systems that
are disk bound, not network bound. It can also help keep a
copy-on-write filesystem snapshot from diverging the entire
contents of a file that only has minor changes.
The option implies --partial (since an interrupted transfer
does not delete the file), but conflicts with --partial-dir
and --delay-updates. Prior to rsync 2.6.4 --inplace was also
incompatible with --compare-dest and --link-dest.
--append
This causes rsync to update a file by appending data onto the
end of the file, which presumes that the data that already
exists on the receiving side is identical with the start of
the file on the sending side. If a file needs to be
transferred and its size on the receiver is the same or longer
than the size on the sender, the file is skipped. This does
not interfere with the updating of a file’s non-content
attributes (e.g. permissions, ownership, etc.) when the file
does not need to be transferred, nor does it affect the
updating of any non-regular files. Implies --inplace.
The use of --append can be dangerous if you aren’t 100% sure
that the files that are longer have only grown by the
appending of data onto the end. You should thus use
include/exclude/filter rules to ensure that such a transfer is
only affecting files that you know to be growing via appended
data.
--append-verify
This works just like the --append option, but the existing
data on the receiving side is included in the full-file
checksum verification step, which will cause a file to be
resent if the final verification step fails (rsync uses a
normal, non-appending --inplace transfer for the resend).
Note: prior to rsync 3.0.0, the --append option worked like
--append-verify, so if you are interacting with an older rsync
(or the transfer is using a protocol prior to 30), specifying
either append option will initiate an --append-verify
transfer.
-d, --dirs
Tell the sending side to include any directories that are
encountered. Unlike --recursive, a directory’s contents are
not copied unless the directory name specified is "." or ends
with a trailing slash (e.g. ".", "dir/.", "dir/", etc.).
Without this option or the --recursive option, rsync will skip
all directories it encounters (and output a message to that
effect for each one). If you specify both --dirs and
--recursive, --recursive takes precedence.
The --dirs option is implied by the --files-from option or the
--list-only option (including an implied --list-only usage) if
--recursive wasn’t specified (so that directories are seen in
the listing). Specify --no-dirs (or --no-d) if you want to
turn this off.
There is also a backward-compatibility helper option,
--old-dirs (or --old-d) that tells rsync to use a hack of "-r
--exclude=’/*/*’" to get an older rsync to list a single
directory without recursing.
-l, --links
When symlinks are encountered, recreate the symlink on the
destination.
-L, --copy-links
When symlinks are encountered, the item that they point to
(the referent) is copied, rather than the symlink. In older
versions of rsync, this option also had the side-effect of
telling the receiving side to follow symlinks, such as
symlinks to directories. In a modern rsync such as this one,
you’ll need to specify --keep-dirlinks (-K) to get this extra
behavior. The only exception is when sending files to an
rsync that is too old to understand -K -- in that case, the -L
option will still have the side-effect of -K on that older
receiving rsync.
--copy-unsafe-links
This tells rsync to copy the referent of symbolic links that
point outside the copied tree. Absolute symlinks are also
treated like ordinary files, and so are any symlinks in the
source path itself when --relative is used. This option has
no additional effect if --copy-links was also specified.
--safe-links
This tells rsync to ignore any symbolic links which point
outside the copied tree. All absolute symlinks are also
ignored. Using this option in conjunction with --relative may
give unexpected results.
--munge-links
This option tells rsync to (1) modify all symlinks on the
receiving side in a way that makes them unusable but
recoverable (see below), or (2) to unmunge symlinks on the
sending side that had been stored in a munged state. This is
useful if you don’t quite trust the source of the data to not
try to slip in a symlink to a unexpected place.
The way rsync disables the use of symlinks is to prefix each
one with the string "/rsyncd-munged/". This prevents the
links from being used as long as that directory does not
exist. When this option is enabled, rsync will refuse to run
if that path is a directory or a symlink to a directory.
The option only affects the client side of the transfer, so if
you need it to affect the server, specify it via
--remote-option. (Note that in a local transfer, the client
side is the sender.)
This option has no affect on a daemon, since the daemon
configures whether it wants munged symlinks via its "munge
symlinks" parameter. See also the "munge-symlinks" perl
script in the support directory of the source code.
-k, --copy-dirlinks
This option causes the sending side to treat a symlink to a
directory as though it were a real directory. This is useful
if you don’t want symlinks to non-directories to be affected,
as they would be using --copy-links.
Without this option, if the sending side has replaced a
directory with a symlink to a directory, the receiving side
will delete anything that is in the way of the new symlink,
including a directory hierarchy (as long as --force or
--delete is in effect).
See also --keep-dirlinks for an analogous option for the
receiving side.
--copy-dirlinks applies to all symlinks to directories in the
source. If you want to follow only a few specified symlinks,
a trick you can use is to pass them as additional source args
with a trailing slash, using --relative to make the paths
match up right. For example:
rsync -r --relative src/./ src/./follow-me/ dest/
This works because rsync calls lstat(2) on the source arg as
given, and the trailing slash makes lstat(2) follow the
symlink, giving rise to a directory in the file-list which
overrides the symlink found during the scan of "src/./".
-K, --keep-dirlinks
This option causes the receiving side to treat a symlink to a
directory as though it were a real directory, but only if it
matches a real directory from the sender. Without this
option, the receiver’s symlink would be deleted and replaced
with a real directory.
For example, suppose you transfer a directory "foo" that
contains a file "file", but "foo" is a symlink to directory
"bar" on the receiver. Without --keep-dirlinks, the receiver
deletes symlink "foo", recreates it as a directory, and
receives the file into the new directory. With
--keep-dirlinks, the receiver keeps the symlink and "file"
ends up in "bar".
One note of caution: if you use --keep-dirlinks, you must
trust all the symlinks in the copy! If it is possible for an
untrusted user to create their own symlink to any directory,
the user could then (on a subsequent copy) replace the symlink
with a real directory and affect the content of whatever
directory the symlink references. For backup copies, you are
better off using something like a bind mount instead of a
symlink to modify your receiving hierarchy.
See also --copy-dirlinks for an analogous option for the
sending side.
-H, --hard-links
This tells rsync to look for hard-linked files in the source
and link together the corresponding files on the destination.
Without this option, hard-linked files in the source are
treated as though they were separate files.
This option does NOT necessarily ensure that the pattern of
hard links on the destination exactly matches that on the
source. Cases in which the destination may end up with extra
hard links include the following:
o If the destination contains extraneous hard-links (more
linking than what is present in the source file list),
the copying algorithm will not break them explicitly.
However, if one or more of the paths have content
differences, the normal file-update process will break
those extra links (unless you are using the --inplace
option).
o If you specify a --link-dest directory that contains
hard links, the linking of the destination files
against the --link-dest files can cause some paths in
the destination to become linked together due to the
--link-dest associations.
Note that rsync can only detect hard links between files that
are inside the transfer set. If rsync updates a file that has
extra hard-link connections to files outside the transfer,
that linkage will be broken. If you are tempted to use the
--inplace option to avoid this breakage, be very careful that
you know how your files are being updated so that you are
certain that no unintended changes happen due to lingering
hard links (and see the --inplace option for more caveats).
If incremental recursion is active (see --recursive), rsync
may transfer a missing hard-linked file before it finds that
another link for that contents exists elsewhere in the
hierarchy. This does not affect the accuracy of the transfer
(i.e. which files are hard-linked together), just its
efficiency (i.e. copying the data for a new, early copy of a
hard-linked file that could have been found later in the
transfer in another member of the hard-linked set of files).
One way to avoid this inefficiency is to disable incremental
recursion using the --no-inc-recursive option.
-p, --perms
This option causes the receiving rsync to set the destination
permissions to be the same as the source permissions. (See
also the --chmod option for a way to modify what rsync
considers to be the source permissions.)
When this option is off, permissions are set as follows:
o Existing files (including updated files) retain their
existing permissions, though the --executability option
might change just the execute permission for the file.
o New files get their "normal" permission bits set to the
source file’s permissions masked with the receiving
directory’s default permissions (either the receiving
process’s umask, or the permissions specified via the
destination directory’s default ACL), and their special
permission bits disabled except in the case where a new
directory inherits a setgid bit from its parent
directory.
Thus, when --perms and --executability are both disabled,
rsync’s behavior is the same as that of other file-copy
utilities, such as cp(1) and tar(1).
In summary: to give destination files (both old and new) the
source permissions, use --perms. To give new files the
destination-default permissions (while leaving existing files
unchanged), make sure that the --perms option is off and use
--chmod=ugo=rwX (which ensures that all non-masked bits get
enabled). If you’d care to make this latter behavior easier
to type, you could define a popt alias for it, such as putting
this line in the file ~/.popt (the following defines the -Z
option, and includes --no-g to use the default group of the
destination dir):
rsync alias -Z --no-p --no-g --chmod=ugo=rwX
You could then use this new option in a command such as this
one:
rsync -avZ src/ dest/
(Caveat: make sure that -a does not follow -Z, or it will
re-enable the two "--no-*" options mentioned above.)
The preservation of the destination’s setgid bit on
newly-created directories when --perms is off was added in
rsync 2.6.7. Older rsync versions erroneously preserved the
three special permission bits for newly-created files when
--perms was off, while overriding the destination’s setgid bit
setting on a newly-created directory. Default ACL observance
was added to the ACL patch for rsync 2.6.7, so older (or
non-ACL-enabled) rsyncs use the umask even if default ACLs are
present. (Keep in mind that it is the version of the
receiving rsync that affects these behaviors.)
-E, --executability
This option causes rsync to preserve the executability (or
non-executability) of regular files when --perms is not
enabled. A regular file is considered to be executable if at
least one ’x’ is turned on in its permissions. When an
existing destination file’s executability differs from that of
the corresponding source file, rsync modifies the destination
file’s permissions as follows:
o To make a file non-executable, rsync turns off all its
’x’ permissions.
o To make a file executable, rsync turns on each ’x’
permission that has a corresponding ’r’ permission
enabled.
If --perms is enabled, this option is ignored.
-A, --acls
This option causes rsync to update the destination ACLs to be
the same as the source ACLs. The option also implies --perms.
The source and destination systems must have compatible ACL
entries for this option to work properly. See the
--fake-super option for a way to backup and restore ACLs that
are not compatible.
-X, --xattrs
This option causes rsync to update the destination extended
attributes to be the same as the source ones.
For systems that support extended-attribute namespaces, a copy
being done by a super-user copies all namespaces except
system.*. A normal user only copies the user.* namespace. To
be able to backup and restore non-user namespaces as a normal
user, see the --fake-super option.
The above name filtering can be overridden by using one or
more filter options with the x modifier. When you specify an
xattr-affecting filter rule, rsync requires that you do your
own system/user filtering, as well as any additional filtering
for what xattr names are copied and what names are allowed to
be deleted. For example, to skip the system namespace, you
could specify:
--filter=’-x system.*’
To skip all namespaces except the user namespace, you could
specify a negated-user match:
--filter=’-x! user.*’
To prevent any attributes from being deleted, you could
specify a receiver-only rule that excludes all names:
--filter=’-xr *’
Note that the -X option does not copy rsync’s special xattr
values (e.g. those used by --fake-super) unless you repeat
the option (e.g. -XX). This "copy all xattrs" mode cannot be
used with --fake-super.
--chmod
This option tells rsync to apply one or more comma-separated
"chmod" modes to the permission of the files in the transfer.
The resulting value is treated as though it were the
permissions that the sending side supplied for the file, which
means that this option can seem to have no effect on existing
files if --perms is not enabled.
In addition to the normal parsing rules specified in the
chmod(1) manpage, you can specify an item that should only
apply to a directory by prefixing it with a ’D’, or specify an
item that should only apply to a file by prefixing it with a
’F’. For example, the following will ensure that all
directories get marked set-gid, that no files are
other-writable, that both are user-writable and
group-writable, and that both have consistent executability
across all bits:
--chmod=Dg+s,ug+w,Fo-w,+X
Using octal mode numbers is also allowed:
--chmod=D2775,F664
It is also legal to specify multiple --chmod options, as each
additional option is just appended to the list of changes to
make.
See the --perms and --executability options for how the
resulting permission value can be applied to the files in the
transfer.
-o, --owner
This option causes rsync to set the owner of the destination
file to be the same as the source file, but only if the
receiving rsync is being run as the super-user (see also the
--super and --fake-super options). Without this option, the
owner of new and/or transferred files are set to the invoking
user on the receiving side.
The preservation of ownership will associate matching names by
default, but may fall back to using the ID number in some
circumstances (see also the --numeric-ids option for a full
discussion).
-g, --group
This option causes rsync to set the group of the destination
file to be the same as the source file. If the receiving
program is not running as the super-user (or if --no-super was
specified), only groups that the invoking user on the
receiving side is a member of will be preserved. Without this
option, the group is set to the default group of the invoking
user on the receiving side.
The preservation of group information will associate matching
names by default, but may fall back to using the ID number in
some circumstances (see also the --numeric-ids option for a
full discussion).
--devices
This option causes rsync to transfer character and block
device files to the remote system to recreate these devices.
This option has no effect if the receiving rsync is not run as
the super-user (see also the --super and --fake-super
options).
--specials
This option causes rsync to transfer special files such as
named sockets and fifos.
-D The -D option is equivalent to --devices --specials.
-t, --times
This tells rsync to transfer modification times along with the
files and update them on the remote system. Note that if this
option is not used, the optimization that excludes files that
have not been modified cannot be effective; in other words, a
missing -t or -a will cause the next transfer to behave as if
it used -I, causing all files to be updated (though rsync’s
delta-transfer algorithm will make the update fairly efficient
if the files haven’t actually changed, you’re much better off
using -t).
-O, --omit-dir-times
This tells rsync to omit directories when it is preserving
modification times (see --times). If NFS is sharing the
directories on the receiving side, it is a good idea to use
-O. This option is inferred if you use --backup without
--backup-dir.
This option also has the side-effect of avoiding early
creation of directories in incremental recursion copies. The
default --inc-recursive copying normally does an early-create
pass of all the sub-directories in a parent directory in order
for it to be able to then set the modify time of the parent
directory right away (without having to delay that until a
bunch of recursive copying has finished). This early-create
idiom is not necessary if directory modify times are not being
preserved, so it is skipped. Since early-create directories
don’t have accurate mode, mtime, or ownership, the use of this
option can help when someone wants to avoid these
partially-finished directories.
-J, --omit-link-times
This tells rsync to omit symlinks when it is preserving
modification times (see --times).
--super
This tells the receiving side to attempt super-user activities
even if the receiving rsync wasn’t run by the super-user.
These activities include: preserving users via the --owner
option, preserving all groups (not just the current user’s
groups) via the --groups option, and copying devices via the
--devices option. This is useful for systems that allow such
activities without being the super-user, and also for ensuring
that you will get errors if the receiving side isn’t being run
as the super-user. To turn off super-user activities, the
super-user can use --no-super.
--fake-super
When this option is enabled, rsync simulates super-user
activities by saving/restoring the privileged attributes via
special extended attributes that are attached to each file (as
needed). This includes the file’s owner and group (if it is
not the default), the file’s device info (device & special
files are created as empty text files), and any permission
bits that we won’t allow to be set on the real file (e.g. the
real file gets u-s,g-s,o-t for safety) or that would limit the
owner’s access (since the real super-user can always
access/change a file, the files we create can always be
accessed/changed by the creating user). This option also
handles ACLs (if --acls was specified) and non-user extended
attributes (if --xattrs was specified).
This is a good way to backup data without using a super-user,
and to store ACLs from incompatible systems.
The --fake-super option only affects the side where the option
is used. To affect the remote side of a remote-shell
connection, use the --remote-option (-M) option:
rsync -av -M--fake-super /src/ host:/dest/
For a local copy, this option affects both the source and the
destination. If you wish a local copy to enable this option
just for the destination files, specify -M--fake-super. If
you wish a local copy to enable this option just for the
source files, combine --fake-super with -M--super.
This option is overridden by both --super and --no-super.
See also the "fake super" setting in the daemon’s rsyncd.conf
file.
-S, --sparse
Try to handle sparse files efficiently so they take up less
space on the destination. If combined with --inplace the file
created might not end up with sparse blocks with some
combinations of kernel version and/or filesystem type. If
--whole-file is in effect (e.g. for a local copy) then it will
always work because rsync truncates the file prior to writing
out the updated version.
Note that versions of rsync older than 3.1.3 will reject the
combination of --sparse and --inplace.
--preallocate
This tells the receiver to allocate each destination file to
its eventual size before writing data to the file. Rsync will
only use the real filesystem-level preallocation support
provided by Linux’s fallocate(2) system call or Cygwin’s
posix_fallocate(3), not the slow glibc implementation that
writes a null byte into each block.
Without this option, larger files may not be entirely
contiguous on the filesystem, but with this option rsync will
probably copy more slowly. If the destination is not an
extent-supporting filesystem (such as ext4, xfs, NTFS, etc.),
this option may have no positive effect at all.
If combined with --sparse, the file will only have sparse
blocks (as opposed to allocated sequences of null bytes) if
the kernel version and filesystem type support creating holes
in the allocated data.
-n, --dry-run
This makes rsync perform a trial run that doesn’t make any
changes (and produces mostly the same output as a real run).
It is most commonly used in combination with the -v, --verbose
and/or -i, --itemize-changes options to see what an rsync
command is going to do before one actually runs it.
The output of --itemize-changes is supposed to be exactly the
same on a dry run and a subsequent real run (barring
intentional trickery and system call failures); if it isn’t,
that’s a bug. Other output should be mostly unchanged, but
may differ in some areas. Notably, a dry run does not send
the actual data for file transfers, so --progress has no
effect, the "bytes sent", "bytes received", "literal data",
and "matched data" statistics are too small, and the "speedup"
value is equivalent to a run where no file transfers were
needed.
-W, --whole-file
This option disables rsync’s delta-transfer algorithm, which
causes all transferred files to be sent whole. The transfer
may be faster if this option is used when the bandwidth
between the source and destination machines is higher than the
bandwidth to disk (especially when the "disk" is actually a
networked filesystem). This is the default when both the
source and destination are specified as local paths, but only
if no batch-writing option is in effect.
--checksum-choice=STR
This option overrides the checksum algoriths. If one
algorithm name is specified, it is used for both the transfer
checksums and (assuming --checksum is specifed) the
pre-transfer checksumming. If two comma-separated names are
supplied, the first name affects the transfer checksums, and
the second name affects the pre-transfer checksumming.
The algorithm choices are "auto", "md4", "md5", and "none".
If "none" is specified for the first name, the --whole-file
option is forced on and no checksum verification is performed
on the transferred data. If "none" is specified for the
second name, the --checksum option cannot be used. The "auto"
option is the default, where rsync bases its algorithm choice
on the protocol version (for backward compatibility with older
rsync versions).
-x, --one-file-system
This tells rsync to avoid crossing a filesystem boundary when
recursing. This does not limit the user’s ability to specify
items to copy from multiple filesystems, just rsync’s
recursion through the hierarchy of each directory that the
user specified, and also the analogous recursion on the
receiving side during deletion. Also keep in mind that rsync
treats a "bind" mount to the same device as being on the same
filesystem.
If this option is repeated, rsync omits all mount-point
directories from the copy. Otherwise, it includes an empty
directory at each mount-point it encounters (using the
attributes of the mounted directory because those of the
underlying mount-point directory are inaccessible).
If rsync has been told to collapse symlinks (via --copy-links
or --copy-unsafe-links), a symlink to a directory on another
device is treated like a mount-point. Symlinks to
non-directories are unaffected by this option.
--existing, --ignore-non-existing
This tells rsync to skip creating files (including
directories) that do not exist yet on the destination. If
this option is combined with the --ignore-existing option, no
files will be updated (which can be useful if all you want to
do is delete extraneous files).
This option is a transfer rule, not an exclude, so it doesn’t
affect the data that goes into the file-lists, and thus it
doesn’t affect deletions. It just limits the files that the
receiver requests to be transferred.
--ignore-existing
This tells rsync to skip updating files that already exist on
the destination (this does not ignore existing directories, or
nothing would get done). See also --existing.
This option is a transfer rule, not an exclude, so it doesn’t
affect the data that goes into the file-lists, and thus it
doesn’t affect deletions. It just limits the files that the
receiver requests to be transferred.
This option can be useful for those doing backups using the
--link-dest option when they need to continue a backup run
that got interrupted. Since a --link-dest run is copied into
a new directory hierarchy (when it is used properly), using
--ignore existing will ensure that the already-handled files
don’t get tweaked (which avoids a change in permissions on the
hard-linked files). This does mean that this option is only
looking at the existing files in the destination hierarchy
itself.
--remove-source-files
This tells rsync to remove from the sending side the files
(meaning non-directories) that are a part of the transfer and
have been successfully duplicated on the receiving side.
Note that you should only use this option on source files that
are quiescent. If you are using this to move files that show
up in a particular directory over to another host, make sure
that the finished files get renamed into the source directory,
not directly written into it, so that rsync can’t possibly
transfer a file that is not yet fully written. If you can’t
first write the files into a different directory, you should
use a naming idiom that lets rsync avoid transferring files
that are not yet finished (e.g. name the file "foo.new" when
it is written, rename it to "foo" when it is done, and then
use the option --exclude='*.new' for the rsync transfer).
Starting with 3.1.0, rsync will skip the sender-side removal
(and output an error) if the file’s size or modify time has
not stayed unchanged.
--delete
This tells rsync to delete extraneous files from the receiving
side (ones that aren’t on the sending side), but only for the
directories that are being synchronized. You must have asked
rsync to send the whole directory (e.g. "dir" or "dir/")
without using a wildcard for the directory’s contents (e.g.
"dir/*") since the wildcard is expanded by the shell and rsync
thus gets a request to transfer individual files, not the
files’ parent directory. Files that are excluded from the
transfer are also excluded from being deleted unless you use
the --delete-excluded option or mark the rules as only
matching on the sending side (see the include/exclude
modifiers in the FILTER RULES section).
Prior to rsync 2.6.7, this option would have no effect unless
--recursive was enabled. Beginning with 2.6.7, deletions will
also occur when --dirs (-d) is enabled, but only for
directories whose contents are being copied.
This option can be dangerous if used incorrectly! It is a
very good idea to first try a run using the --dry-run option
(-n) to see what files are going to be deleted.
If the sending side detects any I/O errors, then the deletion
of any files at the destination will be automatically
disabled. This is to prevent temporary filesystem failures
(such as NFS errors) on the sending side from causing a
massive deletion of files on the destination. You can
override this with the --ignore-errors option.
The --delete option may be combined with one of the
--delete-WHEN options without conflict, as well as
--delete-excluded. However, if none of the --delete-WHEN
options are specified, rsync will choose the --delete-during
algorithm when talking to rsync 3.0.0 or newer, and the
--delete-before algorithm when talking to an older rsync. See
also --delete-delay and --delete-after.
--delete-before
Request that the file-deletions on the receiving side be done
before the transfer starts. See --delete (which is implied)
for more details on file-deletion.
Deleting before the transfer is helpful if the filesystem is
tight for space and removing extraneous files would help to
make the transfer possible. However, it does introduce a
delay before the start of the transfer, and this delay might
cause the transfer to timeout (if --timeout was specified).
It also forces rsync to use the old, non-incremental recursion
algorithm that requires rsync to scan all the files in the
transfer into memory at once (see --recursive).
--delete-during, --del
Request that the file-deletions on the receiving side be done
incrementally as the transfer happens. The per-directory
delete scan is done right before each directory is checked for
updates, so it behaves like a more efficient --delete-before,
including doing the deletions prior to any per-directory
filter files being updated. This option was first added in
rsync version 2.6.4. See --delete (which is implied) for more
details on file-deletion.
--delete-delay
Request that the file-deletions on the receiving side be
computed during the transfer (like --delete-during), and then
removed after the transfer completes. This is useful when
combined with --delay-updates and/or --fuzzy, and is more
efficient than using --delete-after (but can behave
differently, since --delete-after computes the deletions in a
separate pass after all updates are done). If the number of
removed files overflows an internal buffer, a temporary file
will be created on the receiving side to hold the names (it is
removed while open, so you shouldn’t see it during the
transfer). If the creation of the temporary file fails, rsync
will try to fall back to using --delete-after (which it cannot
do if --recursive is doing an incremental scan). See --delete
(which is implied) for more details on file-deletion.
--delete-after
Request that the file-deletions on the receiving side be done
after the transfer has completed. This is useful if you are
sending new per-directory merge files as a part of the
transfer and you want their exclusions to take effect for the
delete phase of the current transfer. It also forces rsync to
use the old, non-incremental recursion algorithm that requires
rsync to scan all the files in the transfer into memory at
once (see --recursive). See --delete (which is implied) for
more details on file-deletion.
--delete-excluded
In addition to deleting the files on the receiving side that
are not on the sending side, this tells rsync to also delete
any files on the receiving side that are excluded (see
--exclude). See the FILTER RULES section for a way to make
individual exclusions behave this way on the receiver, and for
a way to protect files from --delete-excluded. See --delete
(which is implied) for more details on file-deletion.
--ignore-missing-args
When rsync is first processing the explicitly requested source
files (e.g. command-line arguments or --files-from entries),
it is normally an error if the file cannot be found. This
option suppresses that error, and does not try to transfer the
file. This does not affect subsequent vanished-file errors if
a file was initially found to be present and later is no
longer there.
--delete-missing-args
This option takes the behavior of (the implied)
--ignore-missing-args option a step farther: each missing arg
will become a deletion request of the corresponding
destination file on the receiving side (should it exist). If
the destination file is a non-empty directory, it will only be
successfully deleted if --force or --delete are in effect.
Other than that, this option is independent of any other type
of delete processing.
The missing source files are represented by special file-list
entries which display as a "*missing" entry in the --list-only
output.
--ignore-errors
Tells --delete to go ahead and delete files even when there
are I/O errors.
--force
This option tells rsync to delete a non-empty directory when
it is to be replaced by a non-directory. This is only
relevant if deletions are not active (see --delete for
details).
Note for older rsync versions: --force used to still be
required when using --delete-after, and it used to be
non-functional unless the --recursive option was also enabled.
--max-delete=NUM
This tells rsync not to delete more than NUM files or
directories. If that limit is exceeded, all further deletions
are skipped through the end of the transfer. At the end,
rsync outputs a warning (including a count of the skipped
deletions) and exits with an error code of 25 (unless some
more important error condition also occurred).
Beginning with version 3.0.0, you may specify --max-delete=0
to be warned about any extraneous files in the destination
without removing any of them. Older clients interpreted this
as "unlimited", so if you don’t know what version the client
is, you can use the less obvious --max-delete=-1 as a
backward-compatible way to specify that no deletions be
allowed (though really old versions didn’t warn when the limit
was exceeded).
--max-size=SIZE
This tells rsync to avoid transferring any file that is larger
than the specified SIZE. The SIZE value can be suffixed with a
string to indicate a size multiplier, and may be a fractional
value (e.g. "--max-size=1.5m").
This option is a transfer rule, not an exclude, so it doesn’t
affect the data that goes into the file-lists, and thus it
doesn’t affect deletions. It just limits the files that the
receiver requests to be transferred.
The suffixes are as follows: "K" (or "KiB") is a kibibyte
(1024), "M" (or "MiB") is a mebibyte (1024*1024), and "G" (or
"GiB") is a gibibyte (1024*1024*1024). If you want the
multiplier to be 1000 instead of 1024, use "KB", "MB", or
"GB". (Note: lower-case is also accepted for all values.)
Finally, if the suffix ends in either "+1" or "-1", the value
will be offset by one byte in the indicated direction.
Examples: --max-size=1.5mb-1 is 1499999 bytes, and
--max-size=2g+1 is 2147483649 bytes.
Note that rsync versions prior to 3.1.0 did not allow
--max-size=0.
--min-size=SIZE
This tells rsync to avoid transferring any file that is
smaller than the specified SIZE, which can help in not
transferring small, junk files. See the --max-size option for
a description of SIZE and other information.
Note that rsync versions prior to 3.1.0 did not allow
--min-size=0.
-B, --block-size=BLOCKSIZE
This forces the block size used in rsync’s delta-transfer
algorithm to a fixed value. It is normally selected based on
the size of each file being updated. See the technical report
for details.
-e, --rsh=COMMAND
This option allows you to choose an alternative remote shell
program to use for communication between the local and remote
copies of rsync. Typically, rsync is configured to use ssh by
default, but you may prefer to use rsh on a local network.
If this option is used with [user@]host::module/path, then the
remote shell COMMAND will be used to run an rsync daemon on
the remote host, and all data will be transmitted through that
remote shell connection, rather than through a direct socket
connection to a running rsync daemon on the remote host. See
the section "USING RSYNC-DAEMON FEATURES VIA A REMOTE-SHELL
CONNECTION" above.
Command-line arguments are permitted in COMMAND provided that
COMMAND is presented to rsync as a single argument. You must
use spaces (not tabs or other whitespace) to separate the
command and args from each other, and you can use single-
and/or double-quotes to preserve spaces in an argument (but
not backslashes). Note that doubling a single-quote inside a
single-quoted string gives you a single-quote; likewise for
double-quotes (though you need to pay attention to which
quotes your shell is parsing and which quotes rsync is
parsing). Some examples:
-e 'ssh -p 2234'
-e 'ssh -o "ProxyCommand nohup ssh firewall nc -w1 %h %p"'
(Note that ssh users can alternately customize site-specific
connect options in their .ssh/config file.)
You can also choose the remote shell program using the
RSYNC_RSH environment variable, which accepts the same range
of values as -e.
See also the --blocking-io option which is affected by this
option.
--rsync-path=PROGRAM
Use this to specify what program is to be run on the remote
machine to start-up rsync. Often used when rsync is not in
the default remote-shell’s path (e.g.
--rsync-path=/usr/local/bin/rsync). Note that PROGRAM is run
with the help of a shell, so it can be any program, script, or
command sequence you’d care to run, so long as it does not
corrupt the standard-in & standard-out that rsync is using to
communicate.
One tricky example is to set a different default directory on
the remote machine for use with the --relative option. For
instance:
rsync -avR --rsync-path="cd /a/b && rsync" host:c/d /e/
-M, --remote-option=OPTION
This option is used for more advanced situations where you
want certain effects to be limited to one side of the transfer
only. For instance, if you want to pass --log-file=FILE and
--fake-super to the remote system, specify it like this:
rsync -av -M --log-file=foo -M--fake-super src/ dest/
If you want to have an option affect only the local side of a
transfer when it normally affects both sides, send its
negation to the remote side. Like this:
rsync -av -x -M--no-x src/ dest/
Be cautious using this, as it is possible to toggle an option
that will cause rsync to have a different idea about what data
to expect next over the socket, and that will make it fail in
a cryptic fashion.
Note that it is best to use a separate --remote-option for
each option you want to pass. This makes your useage
compatible with the --protect-args option. If that option is
off, any spaces in your remote options will be split by the
remote shell unless you take steps to protect them.
When performing a local transfer, the "local" side is the
sender and the "remote" side is the receiver.
Note some versions of the popt option-parsing library have a
bug in them that prevents you from using an adjacent arg with
an equal in it next to a short option letter (e.g.
-M--log-file=/tmp/foo). If this bug affects your version of
popt, you can use the version of popt that is included with
rsync.
-C, --cvs-exclude
This is a useful shorthand for excluding a broad range of
files that you often don’t want to transfer between systems.
It uses a similar algorithm to CVS to determine if a file
should be ignored.
The exclude list is initialized to exclude the following items
(these initial items are marked as perishable -- see the
FILTER RULES section):
RCS SCCS CVS CVS.adm RCSLOG cvslog.* tags TAGS
.make.state .nse_depinfo *~ #* .#* ,* _$* *$ *.old
*.bak *.BAK *.orig *.rej .del-* *.a *.olb *.o *.obj
*.so *.exe *.Z *.elc *.ln core .svn/ .git/ .hg/ .bzr/
then, files listed in a $HOME/.cvsignore are added to the list
and any files listed in the CVSIGNORE environment variable
(all cvsignore names are delimited by whitespace).
Finally, any file is ignored if it is in the same directory as
a .cvsignore file and matches one of the patterns listed
therein. Unlike rsync’s filter/exclude files, these patterns
are split on whitespace. See the cvs(1) manual for more
information.
If you’re combining -C with your own --filter rules, you
should note that these CVS excludes are appended at the end of
your own rules, regardless of where the -C was placed on the
command-line. This makes them a lower priority than any rules
you specified explicitly. If you want to control where these
CVS excludes get inserted into your filter rules, you should
omit the -C as a command-line option and use a combination of
--filter=:C and --filter=-C (either on your command-line or by
putting the ":C" and "-C" rules into a filter file with your
other rules). The first option turns on the per-directory
scanning for the .cvsignore file. The second option does a
one-time import of the CVS excludes mentioned above.
-f, --filter=RULE
This option allows you to add rules to selectively exclude
certain files from the list of files to be transferred. This
is most useful in combination with a recursive transfer.
You may use as many --filter options on the command line as
you like to build up the list of files to exclude. If the
filter contains whitespace, be sure to quote it so that the
shell gives the rule to rsync as a single argument. The text
below also mentions that you can use an underscore to replace
the space that separates a rule from its arg.
See the FILTER RULES section for detailed information on this
option.
-F The -F option is a shorthand for adding two --filter rules to
your command. The first time it is used is a shorthand for
this rule:
--filter='dir-merge /.rsync-filter'
This tells rsync to look for per-directory .rsync-filter files
that have been sprinkled through the hierarchy and use their
rules to filter the files in the transfer. If -F is repeated,
it is a shorthand for this rule:
--filter='exclude .rsync-filter'
This filters out the .rsync-filter files themselves from the
transfer.
See the FILTER RULES section for detailed information on how
these options work.
--exclude=PATTERN
This option is a simplified form of the --filter option that
defaults to an exclude rule and does not allow the full
rule-parsing syntax of normal filter rules.
See the FILTER RULES section for detailed information on this
option.
--exclude-from=FILE
This option is related to the --exclude option, but it
specifies a FILE that contains exclude patterns (one per
line). Blank lines in the file and lines starting with ’;’ or
’#’ are ignored. If FILE is -, the list will be read from
standard input.
--include=PATTERN
This option is a simplified form of the --filter option that
defaults to an include rule and does not allow the full
rule-parsing syntax of normal filter rules.
See the FILTER RULES section for detailed information on this
option.
--include-from=FILE
This option is related to the --include option, but it
specifies a FILE that contains include patterns (one per
line). Blank lines in the file and lines starting with ’;’ or
’#’ are ignored. If FILE is -, the list will be read from
standard input.
--files-from=FILE
Using this option allows you to specify the exact list of
files to transfer (as read from the specified FILE or - for
standard input). It also tweaks the default behavior of rsync
to make transferring just the specified files and directories
easier:
o The --relative (-R) option is implied, which preserves
the path information that is specified for each item in
the file (use --no-relative or --no-R if you want to
turn that off).
o The --dirs (-d) option is implied, which will create
directories specified in the list on the destination
rather than noisily skipping them (use --no-dirs or
--no-d if you want to turn that off).
o The --archive (-a) option’s behavior does not imply
--recursive (-r), so specify it explicitly, if you want
it.
o These side-effects change the default state of rsync,
so the position of the --files-from option on the
command-line has no bearing on how other options are
parsed (e.g. -a works the same before or after
--files-from, as does --no-R and all other options).
The filenames that are read from the FILE are all relative to
the source dir -- any leading slashes are removed and no ".."
references are allowed to go higher than the source dir. For
example, take this command:
rsync -a --files-from=/tmp/foo /usr remote:/backup
If /tmp/foo contains the string "bin" (or even "/bin"), the
/usr/bin directory will be created as /backup/bin on the
remote host. If it contains "bin/" (note the trailing slash),
the immediate contents of the directory would also be sent
(without needing to be explicitly mentioned in the file --
this began in version 2.6.4). In both cases, if the -r option
was enabled, that dir’s entire hierarchy would also be
transferred (keep in mind that -r needs to be specified
explicitly with --files-from, since it is not implied by -a).
Also note that the effect of the (enabled by default)
--relative option is to duplicate only the path info that is
read from the file -- it does not force the duplication of the
source-spec path (/usr in this case).
In addition, the --files-from file can be read from the remote
host instead of the local host if you specify a "host:" in
front of the file (the host must match one end of the
transfer). As a short-cut, you can specify just a prefix of
":" to mean "use the remote end of the transfer". For
example:
rsync -a --files-from=:/path/file-list src:/ /tmp/copy
This would copy all the files specified in the /path/file-list
file that was located on the remote "src" host.
If the --iconv and --protect-args options are specified and
the --files-from filenames are being sent from one host to
another, the filenames will be translated from the sending
host’s charset to the receiving host’s charset.
NOTE: sorting the list of files in the --files-from input
helps rsync to be more efficient, as it will avoid re-visiting
the path elements that are shared between adjacent entries.
If the input is not sorted, some path elements (implied
directories) may end up being scanned multiple times, and
rsync will eventually unduplicate them after they get turned
into file-list elements.
-0, --from0
This tells rsync that the rules/filenames it reads from a file
are terminated by a null (’\0’) character, not a NL, CR, or
CR+LF. This affects --exclude-from, --include-from,
--files-from, and any merged files specified in a --filter
rule. It does not affect --cvs-exclude (since all names read
from a .cvsignore file are split on whitespace).
-s, --protect-args
This option sends all filenames and most options to the remote
rsync without allowing the remote shell to interpret them.
This means that spaces are not split in names, and any
non-wildcard special characters are not translated (such as ~,
$, ;, &, etc.). Wildcards are expanded on the remote host by
rsync (instead of the shell doing it).
If you use this option with --iconv, the args related to the
remote side will also be translated from the local to the
remote character-set. The translation happens before
wild-cards are expanded. See also the --files-from option.
You may also control this option via the RSYNC_PROTECT_ARGS
environment variable. If this variable has a non-zero value,
this option will be enabled by default, otherwise it will be
disabled by default. Either state is overridden by a manually
specified positive or negative version of this option (note
that --no-s and --no-protect-args are the negative versions).
Since this option was first introduced in 3.0.0, you’ll need
to make sure it’s disabled if you ever need to interact with a
remote rsync that is older than that.
Rsync can also be configured (at build time) to have this
option enabled by default (with is overridden by both the
environment and the command-line). This option will
eventually become a new default setting at some
as-yet-undetermined point in the future.
-T, --temp-dir=DIR
This option instructs rsync to use DIR as a scratch directory
when creating temporary copies of the files transferred on the
receiving side. The default behavior is to create each
temporary file in the same directory as the associated
destination file. Beginning with rsync 3.1.1, the temp-file
names inside the specified DIR will not be prefixed with an
extra dot (though they will still have a random suffix added).
This option is most often used when the receiving disk
partition does not have enough free space to hold a copy of
the largest file in the transfer. In this case (i.e. when the
scratch directory is on a different disk partition), rsync
will not be able to rename each received temporary file over
the top of the associated destination file, but instead must
copy it into place. Rsync does this by copying the file over
the top of the destination file, which means that the
destination file will contain truncated data during this copy.
If this were not done this way (even if the destination file
were first removed, the data locally copied to a temporary
file in the destination directory, and then renamed into
place) it would be possible for the old file to continue
taking up disk space (if someone had it open), and thus there
might not be enough room to fit the new version on the disk at
the same time.
If you are using this option for reasons other than a shortage
of disk space, you may wish to combine it with the
--delay-updates option, which will ensure that all copied
files get put into subdirectories in the destination
hierarchy, awaiting the end of the transfer. If you don’t
have enough room to duplicate all the arriving files on the
destination partition, another way to tell rsync that you
aren’t overly concerned about disk space is to use the
--partial-dir option with a relative path; because this tells
rsync that it is OK to stash off a copy of a single file in a
subdir in the destination hierarchy, rsync will use the
partial-dir as a staging area to bring over the copied file,
and then rename it into place from there. (Specifying a
--partial-dir with an absolute path does not have this
side-effect.)
-y, --fuzzy
This option tells rsync that it should look for a basis file
for any destination file that is missing. The current
algorithm looks in the same directory as the destination file
for either a file that has an identical size and
modified-time, or a similarly-named file. If found, rsync
uses the fuzzy basis file to try to speed up the transfer.
If the option is repeated, the fuzzy scan will also be done in
any matching alternate destination directories that are
specified via --compare-dest, --copy-dest, or --link-dest.
Note that the use of the --delete option might get rid of any
potential fuzzy-match files, so either use --delete-after or
specify some filename exclusions if you need to prevent this.
--compare-dest=DIR
This option instructs rsync to use DIR on the destination
machine as an additional hierarchy to compare destination
files against doing transfers (if the files are missing in the
destination directory). If a file is found in DIR that is
identical to the sender’s file, the file will NOT be
transferred to the destination directory. This is useful for
creating a sparse backup of just files that have changed from
an earlier backup. This option is typically used to copy into
an empty (or newly created) directory.
Beginning in version 2.6.4, multiple --compare-dest
directories may be provided, which will cause rsync to search
the list in the order specified for an exact match. If a
match is found that differs only in attributes, a local copy
is made and the attributes updated. If a match is not found,
a basis file from one of the DIRs will be selected to try to
speed up the transfer.
If DIR is a relative path, it is relative to the destination
directory. See also --copy-dest and --link-dest.
NOTE: beginning with version 3.1.0, rsync will remove a file
from a non-empty destination hierarchy if an exact match is
found in one of the compare-dest hierarchies (making the end
result more closely match a fresh copy).
--copy-dest=DIR
This option behaves like --compare-dest, but rsync will also
copy unchanged files found in DIR to the destination directory
using a local copy. This is useful for doing transfers to a
new destination while leaving existing files intact, and then
doing a flash-cutover when all files have been successfully
transferred.
Multiple --copy-dest directories may be provided, which will
cause rsync to search the list in the order specified for an
unchanged file. If a match is not found, a basis file from
one of the DIRs will be selected to try to speed up the
transfer.
If DIR is a relative path, it is relative to the destination
directory. See also --compare-dest and --link-dest.
--link-dest=DIR
This option behaves like --copy-dest, but unchanged files are
hard linked from DIR to the destination directory. The files
must be identical in all preserved attributes (e.g.
permissions, possibly ownership) in order for the files to be
linked together. An example:
rsync -av --link-dest=$PWD/prior_dir host:src_dir/ new_dir/
If file’s aren’t linking, double-check their attributes. Also
check if some attributes are getting forced outside of rsync’s
control, such a mount option that squishes root to a single
user, or mounts a removable drive with generic ownership (such
as OS X’s "Ignore ownership on this volume" option).
Beginning in version 2.6.4, multiple --link-dest directories
may be provided, which will cause rsync to search the list in
the order specified for an exact match (there is a limit of 20
such directories). If a match is found that differs only in
attributes, a local copy is made and the attributes updated.
If a match is not found, a basis file from one of the DIRs
will be selected to try to speed up the transfer.
This option works best when copying into an empty destination
hierarchy, as existing files may get their attributes tweaked,
and that can affect alternate destination files via
hard-links. Also, itemizing of changes can get a bit muddled.
Note that prior to version 3.1.0, an alternate-directory exact
match would never be found (nor linked into the destination)
when a destination file already exists.
Note that if you combine this option with --ignore-times,
rsync will not link any files together because it only links
identical files together as a substitute for transferring the
file, never as an additional check after the file is updated.
If DIR is a relative path, it is relative to the destination
directory. See also --compare-dest and --copy-dest.
Note that rsync versions prior to 2.6.1 had a bug that could
prevent --link-dest from working properly for a non-super-user
when -o was specified (or implied by -a). You can work-around
this bug by avoiding the -o option when sending to an old
rsync.
-z, --compress
With this option, rsync compresses the file data as it is sent
to the destination machine, which reduces the amount of data
being transmitted -- something that is useful over a slow
connection.
Note that this option typically achieves better compression
ratios than can be achieved by using a compressing remote
shell or a compressing transport because it takes advantage of
the implicit information in the matching data blocks that are
not explicitly sent over the connection. This matching-data
compression comes at a cost of CPU, though, and can be
disabled by repeating the -z option, but only if both sides
are at least version 3.1.1.
Note that if your version of rsync was compiled with an
external zlib (instead of the zlib that comes packaged with
rsync) then it will not support the old-style compression,
only the new-style (repeated-option) compression. In the
future this new-style compression will likely become the
default.
The client rsync requests new-style compression on the server
via the --new-compress option, so if you see that option
rejected it means that the server is not new enough to support
-zz. Rsync also accepts the --old-compress option for a
future time when new-style compression becomes the default.
See the --skip-compress option for the default list of file
suffixes that will not be compressed.
--compress-level=NUM
Explicitly set the compression level to use (see --compress)
instead of letting it default. If NUM is non-zero, the
--compress option is implied.
--skip-compress=LIST
Override the list of file suffixes that will not be
compressed. The LIST should be one or more file suffixes
(without the dot) separated by slashes (/).
You may specify an empty string to indicate that no file
should be skipped.
Simple character-class matching is supported: each must
consist of a list of letters inside the square brackets (e.g.
no special classes, such as "[:alpha:]", are supported, and
’-’ has no special meaning).
The characters asterisk (*) and question-mark (?) have no
special meaning.
Here’s an example that specifies 6 suffixes to skip (since 1
of the 5 rules matches 2 suffixes):
--skip-compress=gz/jpg/mp[34]/7z/bz2
The default list of suffixes that will not be compressed is
this (in this version of rsync):
7z ace avi bz2 deb gpg gz iso jpeg jpg lz lzma lzo mov mp3 mp4
ogg png rar rpm rzip tbz tgz tlz txz xz z zip
This list will be replaced by your --skip-compress list in all
but one situation: a copy from a daemon rsync will add your
skipped suffixes to its list of non-compressing files (and its
list may be configured to a different default).
--numeric-ids
With this option rsync will transfer numeric group and user
IDs rather than using user and group names and mapping them at
both ends.
By default rsync will use the username and groupname to
determine what ownership to give files. The special uid 0 and
the special group 0 are never mapped via user/group names even
if the --numeric-ids option is not specified.
If a user or group has no name on the source system or it has
no match on the destination system, then the numeric ID from
the source system is used instead. See also the comments on
the "use chroot" setting in the rsyncd.conf manpage for
information on how the chroot setting affects rsync’s ability
to look up the names of the users and groups and what you can
do about it.
--usermap=STRING, --groupmap=STRING
These options allow you to specify users and groups that
should be mapped to other values by the receiving side. The
STRING is one or more FROM:TO pairs of values separated by
commas. Any matching FROM value from the sender is replaced
with a TO value from the receiver. You may specify usernames
or user IDs for the FROM and TO values, and the FROM value may
also be a wild-card string, which will be matched against the
sender’s names (wild-cards do NOT match against ID numbers,
though see below for why a ’*’ matches everything). You may
instead specify a range of ID numbers via an inclusive range:
LOW-HIGH. For example:
--usermap=0-99:nobody,wayne:admin,*:normal --groupmap=usr:1,1:usr
The first match in the list is the one that is used. You
should specify all your user mappings using a single --usermap
option, and/or all your group mappings using a single
--groupmap option.
Note that the sender’s name for the 0 user and group are not
transmitted to the receiver, so you should either match these
values using a 0, or use the names in effect on the receiving
side (typically "root"). All other FROM names match those in
use on the sending side. All TO names match those in use on
the receiving side.
Any IDs that do not have a name on the sending side are
treated as having an empty name for the purpose of matching.
This allows them to be matched via a "*" or using an empty
name. For instance:
--usermap=:nobody --groupmap=*:nobody
When the --numeric-ids option is used, the sender does not
send any names, so all the IDs are treated as having an empty
name. This means that you will need to specify numeric FROM
values if you want to map these nameless IDs to different
values.
For the --usermap option to have any effect, the -o (--owner)
option must be used (or implied), and the receiver will need
to be running as a super-user (see also the --fake-super
option). For the --groupmap option to have any effect, the -g
(--groups) option must be used (or implied), and the receiver
will need to have permissions to set that group.
--chown=USER:GROUP
This option forces all files to be owned by USER with group
GROUP. This is a simpler interface than using --usermap and
--groupmap directly, but it is implemented using those options
internally, so you cannot mix them. If either the USER or
GROUP is empty, no mapping for the omitted user/group will
occur. If GROUP is empty, the trailing colon may be omitted,
but if USER is empty, a leading colon must be supplied.
If you specify "--chown=foo:bar, this is exactly the same as
specifying "--usermap=*:foo --groupmap=*:bar", only easier.
--timeout=TIMEOUT
This option allows you to set a maximum I/O timeout in
seconds. If no data is transferred for the specified time then
rsync will exit. The default is 0, which means no timeout.
--contimeout
This option allows you to set the amount of time that rsync
will wait for its connection to an rsync daemon to succeed.
If the timeout is reached, rsync exits with an error.
--address
By default rsync will bind to the wildcard address when
connecting to an rsync daemon. The --address option allows
you to specify a specific IP address (or hostname) to bind to.
See also this option in the --daemon mode section.
--port=PORT
This specifies an alternate TCP port number to use rather than
the default of 873. This is only needed if you are using the
double-colon (::) syntax to connect with an rsync daemon
(since the URL syntax has a way to specify the port as a part
of the URL). See also this option in the --daemon mode
section.
--sockopts
This option can provide endless fun for people who like to
tune their systems to the utmost degree. You can set all sorts
of socket options which may make transfers faster (or
slower!). Read the man page for the setsockopt() system call
for details on some of the options you may be able to set. By
default no special socket options are set. This only affects
direct socket connections to a remote rsync daemon. This
option also exists in the --daemon mode section.
--blocking-io
This tells rsync to use blocking I/O when launching a remote
shell transport. If the remote shell is either rsh or remsh,
rsync defaults to using blocking I/O, otherwise it defaults to
using non-blocking I/O. (Note that ssh prefers non-blocking
I/O.)
--outbuf=MODE
This sets the output buffering mode. The mode can be None
(aka Unbuffered), Line, or Block (aka Full). You may specify
as little as a single letter for the mode, and use upper or
lower case.
The main use of this option is to change Full buffering to
Line buffering when rsync’s output is going to a file or pipe.
-i, --itemize-changes
Requests a simple itemized list of the changes that are being
made to each file, including attribute changes. This is
exactly the same as specifying --out-format='%i %n%L'. If you
repeat the option, unchanged files will also be output, but
only if the receiving rsync is at least version 2.6.7 (you can
use -vv with older versions of rsync, but that also turns on
the output of other verbose messages).
The "%i" escape has a cryptic output that is 11 letters long.
The general format is like the string YXcstpoguax, where Y is
replaced by the type of update being done, X is replaced by
the file-type, and the other letters represent attributes that
may be output if they are being modified.
The update types that replace the Y are as follows:
o A < means that a file is being transferred to the
remote host (sent).
o A > means that a file is being transferred to the local
host (received).
o A c means that a local change/creation is occurring for
the item (such as the creation of a directory or the
changing of a symlink, etc.).
o A h means that the item is a hard link to another item
(requires --hard-links).
o A . means that the item is not being updated (though it
might have attributes that are being modified).
o A * means that the rest of the itemized-output area
contains a message (e.g. "deleting").
The file-types that replace the X are: f for a file, a d for a
directory, an L for a symlink, a D for a device, and a S for a
special file (e.g. named sockets and fifos).
The other letters in the string above are the actual letters
that will be output if the associated attribute for the item
is being updated or a "." for no change. Three exceptions to
this are: (1) a newly created item replaces each letter with a
"+", (2) an identical item replaces the dots with spaces, and
(3) an unknown attribute replaces each letter with a "?" (this
can happen when talking to an older rsync).
The attribute that is associated with each letter is as
follows:
o A c means either that a regular file has a different
checksum (requires --checksum) or that a symlink,
device, or special file has a changed value. Note that
if you are sending files to an rsync prior to 3.0.1,
this change flag will be present only for
checksum-differing regular files.
o A s means the size of a regular file is different and
will be updated by the file transfer.
o A t means the modification time is different and is
being updated to the sender’s value (requires --times).
An alternate value of T means that the modification
time will be set to the transfer time, which happens
when a file/symlink/device is updated without --times
and when a symlink is changed and the receiver can’t
set its time. (Note: when using an rsync 3.0.0 client,
you might see the s flag combined with t instead of the
proper T flag for this time-setting failure.)
o A p means the permissions are different and are being
updated to the sender’s value (requires --perms).
o An o means the owner is different and is being updated
to the sender’s value (requires --owner and super-user
privileges).
o A g means the group is different and is being updated
to the sender’s value (requires --group and the
authority to set the group).
o The u slot is reserved for future use.
o The a means that the ACL information changed.
o The x means that the extended attribute information
changed.
One other output is possible: when deleting files, the "%i"
will output the string "*deleting" for each item that is being
removed (assuming that you are talking to a recent enough
rsync that it logs deletions instead of outputting them as a
verbose message).
--out-format=FORMAT
This allows you to specify exactly what the rsync client
outputs to the user on a per-update basis. The format is a
text string containing embedded single-character escape
sequences prefixed with a percent (%) character. A default
format of "%n%L" is assumed if either --info=name or -v is
specified (this tells you just the name of the file and, if
the item is a link, where it points). For a full list of the
possible escape characters, see the "log format" setting in
the rsyncd.conf manpage.
Specifying the --out-format option implies the --info=name
option, which will mention each file, dir, etc. that gets
updated in a significant way (a transferred file, a recreated
symlink/device, or a touched directory). In addition, if the
itemize-changes escape (%i) is included in the string (e.g. if
the --itemize-changes option was used), the logging of names
increases to mention any item that is changed in any way (as
long as the receiving side is at least 2.6.4). See the
--itemize-changes option for a description of the output of
"%i".
Rsync will output the out-format string prior to a file’s
transfer unless one of the transfer-statistic escapes is
requested, in which case the logging is done at the end of the
file’s transfer. When this late logging is in effect and
--progress is also specified, rsync will also output the name
of the file being transferred prior to its progress
information (followed, of course, by the out-format output).
--log-file=FILE
This option causes rsync to log what it is doing to a file.
This is similar to the logging that a daemon does, but can be
requested for the client side and/or the server side of a
non-daemon transfer. If specified as a client option,
transfer logging will be enabled with a default format of "%i
%n%L". See the --log-file-format option if you wish to
override this.
Here’s a example command that requests the remote side to log
what is happening:
rsync -av --remote-option=--log-file=/tmp/rlog src/ dest/
This is very useful if you need to debug why a connection is
closing unexpectedly.
--log-file-format=FORMAT
This allows you to specify exactly what per-update logging is
put into the file specified by the --log-file option (which
must also be specified for this option to have any effect).
If you specify an empty string, updated files will not be
mentioned in the log file. For a list of the possible escape
characters, see the "log format" setting in the rsyncd.conf
manpage.
The default FORMAT used if --log-file is specified and this
option is not is ’%i %n%L’.
--stats
This tells rsync to print a verbose set of statistics on the
file transfer, allowing you to tell how effective rsync’s
delta-transfer algorithm is for your data. This option is
equivalent to --info=stats2 if combined with 0 or 1 -v
options, or --info=stats3 if combined with 2 or more -v
options.
The current statistics are as follows:
o Number of files is the count of all "files" (in the
generic sense), which includes directories, symlinks,
etc. The total count will be followed by a list of
counts by filetype (if the total is non-zero). For
example: "(reg: 5, dir: 3, link: 2, dev: 1, special:
1)" lists the totals for regular files, directories,
symlinks, devices, and special files. If any of value
is 0, it is completely omitted from the list.
o Number of created files is the count of how many
"files" (generic sense) were created (as opposed to
updated). The total count will be followed by a list
of counts by filetype (if the total is non-zero).
o Number of deleted files is the count of how many
"files" (generic sense) were created (as opposed to
updated). The total count will be followed by a list
of counts by filetype (if the total is non-zero). Note
that this line is only output if deletions are in
effect, and only if protocol 31 is being used (the
default for rsync 3.1.x).
o Number of regular files transferred is the count of
normal files that were updated via rsync’s
delta-transfer algorithm, which does not include dirs,
symlinks, etc. Note that rsync 3.1.0 added the word
"regular" into this heading.
o Total file size is the total sum of all file sizes in
the transfer. This does not count any size for
directories or special files, but does include the size
of symlinks.
o Total transferred file size is the total sum of all
files sizes for just the transferred files.
o Literal data is how much unmatched file-update data we
had to send to the receiver for it to recreate the
updated files.
o Matched data is how much data the receiver got locally
when recreating the updated files.
o File list size is how big the file-list data was when
the sender sent it to the receiver. This is smaller
than the in-memory size for the file list due to some
compressing of duplicated data when rsync sends the
list.
o File list generation time is the number of seconds that
the sender spent creating the file list. This requires
a modern rsync on the sending side for this to be
present.
o File list transfer time is the number of seconds that
the sender spent sending the file list to the receiver.
o Total bytes sent is the count of all the bytes that
rsync sent from the client side to the server side.
o Total bytes received is the count of all non-message
bytes that rsync received by the client side from the
server side. "Non-message" bytes means that we don’t
count the bytes for a verbose message that the server
sent to us, which makes the stats more consistent.
-8, --8-bit-output
This tells rsync to leave all high-bit characters unescaped in
the output instead of trying to test them to see if they’re
valid in the current locale and escaping the invalid ones.
All control characters (but never tabs) are always escaped,
regardless of this option’s setting.
The escape idiom that started in 2.6.7 is to output a literal
backslash (\) and a hash (#), followed by exactly 3 octal
digits. For example, a newline would output as "\#012". A
literal backslash that is in a filename is not escaped unless
it is followed by a hash and 3 digits (0-9).
-h, --human-readable
Output numbers in a more human-readable format. There are 3
possible levels: (1) output numbers with a separator between
each set of 3 digits (either a comma or a period, depending on
if the decimal point is represented by a period or a comma);
(2) output numbers in units of 1000 (with a character suffix
for larger units -- see below); (3) output numbers in units of
1024.
The default is human-readable level 1. Each -h option
increases the level by one. You can take the level down to 0
(to output numbers as pure digits) by specifing the
--no-human-readable (--no-h) option.
The unit letters that are appended in levels 2 and 3 are: K
(kilo), M (mega), G (giga), or T (tera). For example, a
1234567-byte file would output as 1.23M in level-2 (assuming
that a period is your local decimal point).
Backward compatibility note: versions of rsync prior to 3.1.0
do not support human-readable level 1, and they default to
level 0. Thus, specifying one or two -h options will behave
in a comparable manner in old and new versions as long as you
didn’t specify a --no-h option prior to one or more -h
options. See the --list-only option for one difference.
--partial
By default, rsync will delete any partially transferred file
if the transfer is interrupted. In some circumstances it is
more desirable to keep partially transferred files. Using the
--partial option tells rsync to keep the partial file which
should make a subsequent transfer of the rest of the file much
faster.
--partial-dir=DIR
A better way to keep partial files than the --partial option
is to specify a DIR that will be used to hold the partial data
(instead of writing it out to the destination file). On the
next transfer, rsync will use a file found in this dir as data
to speed up the resumption of the transfer and then delete it
after it has served its purpose.
Note that if --whole-file is specified (or implied), any
partial-dir file that is found for a file that is being
updated will simply be removed (since rsync is sending files
without using rsync’s delta-transfer algorithm).
Rsync will create the DIR if it is missing (just the last dir
-- not the whole path). This makes it easy to use a relative
path (such as "--partial-dir=.rsync-partial") to have rsync
create the partial-directory in the destination file’s
directory when needed, and then remove it again when the
partial file is deleted.
If the partial-dir value is not an absolute path, rsync will
add an exclude rule at the end of all your existing excludes.
This will prevent the sending of any partial-dir files that
may exist on the sending side, and will also prevent the
untimely deletion of partial-dir items on the receiving side.
An example: the above --partial-dir option would add the
equivalent of "-f '-p .rsync-partial/'" at the end of any
other filter rules.
If you are supplying your own exclude rules, you may need to
add your own exclude/hide/protect rule for the partial-dir
because (1) the auto-added rule may be ineffective at the end
of your other rules, or (2) you may wish to override rsync’s
exclude choice. For instance, if you want to make rsync
clean-up any left-over partial-dirs that may be lying around,
you should specify --delete-after and add a "risk" filter
rule, e.g. -f 'R .rsync-partial/'. (Avoid using
--delete-before or --delete-during unless you don’t need rsync
to use any of the left-over partial-dir data during the
current run.)
IMPORTANT: the --partial-dir should not be writable by other
users or it is a security risk. E.g. AVOID "/tmp".
You can also set the partial-dir value the RSYNC_PARTIAL_DIR
environment variable. Setting this in the environment does
not force --partial to be enabled, but rather it affects where
partial files go when --partial is specified. For instance,
instead of using --partial-dir=.rsync-tmp along with
--progress, you could set RSYNC_PARTIAL_DIR=.rsync-tmp in your
environment and then just use the -P option to turn on the use
of the .rsync-tmp dir for partial transfers. The only times
that the --partial option does not look for this environment
value are (1) when --inplace was specified (since --inplace
conflicts with --partial-dir), and (2) when --delay-updates
was specified (see below).
For the purposes of the daemon-config’s "refuse options"
setting, --partial-dir does not imply --partial. This is so
that a refusal of the --partial option can be used to disallow
the overwriting of destination files with a partial transfer,
while still allowing the safer idiom provided by
--partial-dir.
--delay-updates
This option puts the temporary file from each updated file
into a holding directory until the end of the transfer, at
which time all the files are renamed into place in rapid
succession. This attempts to make the updating of the files a
little more atomic. By default the files are placed into a
directory named ".~tmp~" in each file’s destination directory,
but if you’ve specified the --partial-dir option, that
directory will be used instead. See the comments in the
--partial-dir section for a discussion of how this ".~tmp~"
dir will be excluded from the transfer, and what you can do if
you want rsync to cleanup old ".~tmp~" dirs that might be
lying around. Conflicts with --inplace and --append.
This option uses more memory on the receiving side (one bit
per file transferred) and also requires enough free disk space
on the receiving side to hold an additional copy of all the
updated files. Note also that you should not use an absolute
path to --partial-dir unless (1) there is no chance of any of
the files in the transfer having the same name (since all the
updated files will be put into a single directory if the path
is absolute) and (2) there are no mount points in the
hierarchy (since the delayed updates will fail if they can’t
be renamed into place).
See also the "atomic-rsync" perl script in the "support"
subdir for an update algorithm that is even more atomic (it
uses --link-dest and a parallel hierarchy of files).
-m, --prune-empty-dirs
This option tells the receiving rsync to get rid of empty
directories from the file-list, including nested directories
that have no non-directory children. This is useful for
avoiding the creation of a bunch of useless directories when
the sending rsync is recursively scanning a hierarchy of files
using include/exclude/filter rules.
Note that the use of transfer rules, such as the --min-size
option, does not affect what goes into the file list, and thus
does not leave directories empty, even if none of the files in
a directory match the transfer rule.
Because the file-list is actually being pruned, this option
also affects what directories get deleted when a delete is
active. However, keep in mind that excluded files and
directories can prevent existing items from being deleted due
to an exclude both hiding source files and protecting
destination files. See the perishable filter-rule option for
how to avoid this.
You can prevent the pruning of certain empty directories from
the file-list by using a global "protect" filter. For
instance, this option would ensure that the directory
"emptydir" was kept in the file-list:
--filter ’protect emptydir/’
Here’s an example that copies all .pdf files in a hierarchy,
only creating the necessary destination directories to hold
the .pdf files, and ensures that any superfluous files and
directories in the destination are removed (note the hide
filter of non-directories being used instead of an exclude):
rsync -avm --del --include=’*.pdf’ -f ’hide,! */’ src/ dest
If you didn’t want to remove superfluous destination files,
the more time-honored options of "--include='*/'
--exclude='*'" would work fine in place of the hide-filter (if
that is more natural to you).
--progress
This option tells rsync to print information showing the
progress of the transfer. This gives a bored user something to
watch. With a modern rsync this is the same as specifying
--info=flist2,name,progress, but any user-supplied settings
for those info flags takes precedence (e.g. "--info=flist0
--progress").
While rsync is transferring a regular file, it updates a
progress line that looks like this:
782448 63% 110.64kB/s 0:00:04
In this example, the receiver has reconstructed 782448 bytes
or 63% of the sender’s file, which is being reconstructed at a
rate of 110.64 kilobytes per second, and the transfer will
finish in 4 seconds if the current rate is maintained until
the end.
These statistics can be misleading if rsync’s delta-transfer
algorithm is in use. For example, if the sender’s file
consists of the basis file followed by additional data, the
reported rate will probably drop dramatically when the
receiver gets to the literal data, and the transfer will
probably take much longer to finish than the receiver
estimated as it was finishing the matched part of the file.
When the file transfer finishes, rsync replaces the progress
line with a summary line that looks like this:
1,238,099 100% 146.38kB/s 0:00:08 (xfr#5, to-chk=169/396)
In this example, the file was 1,238,099 bytes long in total,
the average rate of transfer for the whole file was 146.38
kilobytes per second over the 8 seconds that it took to
complete, it was the 5th transfer of a regular file during the
current rsync session, and there are 169 more files for the
receiver to check (to see if they are up-to-date or not)
remaining out of the 396 total files in the file-list.
In an incremental recursion scan, rsync won’t know the total
number of files in the file-list until it reaches the ends of
the scan, but since it starts to transfer files during the
scan, it will display a line with the text "ir-chk" (for
incremental recursion check) instead of "to-chk" until the
point that it knows the full size of the list, at which point
it will switch to using "to-chk". Thus, seeing "ir-chk" lets
you know that the total count of files in the file list is
still going to increase (and each time it does, the count of
files left to check will increase by the number of the files
added to the list).
-P The -P option is equivalent to --partial --progress. Its
purpose is to make it much easier to specify these two options
for a long transfer that may be interrupted.
There is also a --info=progress2 option that outputs
statistics based on the whole transfer, rather than individual
files. Use this flag without outputting a filename (e.g.
avoid -v or specify --info=name0) if you want to see how the
transfer is doing without scrolling the screen with a lot of
names. (You don’t need to specify the --progress option in
order to use --info=progress2.)
--password-file=FILE
This option allows you to provide a password for accessing an
rsync daemon via a file or via standard input if FILE is -.
The file should contain just the password on the first line
(all other lines are ignored). Rsync will exit with an error
if FILE is world readable or if a root-run rsync command finds
a non-root-owned file.
This option does not supply a password to a remote shell
transport such as ssh; to learn how to do that, consult the
remote shell’s documentation. When accessing an rsync daemon
using a remote shell as the transport, this option only comes
into effect after the remote shell finishes its authentication
(i.e. if you have also specified a password in the daemon’s
config file).
--list-only
This option will cause the source files to be listed instead
of transferred. This option is inferred if there is a single
source arg and no destination specified, so its main uses are:
(1) to turn a copy command that includes a destination arg
into a file-listing command, or (2) to be able to specify more
than one source arg (note: be sure to include the
destination). Caution: keep in mind that a source arg with a
wild-card is expanded by the shell into multiple args, so it
is never safe to try to list such an arg without using this
option. For example:
rsync -av --list-only foo* dest/
Starting with rsync 3.1.0, the sizes output by --list-only are
affected by the --human-readable option. By default they will
contain digit separators, but higher levels of readability
will output the sizes with unit suffixes. Note also that the
column width for the size output has increased from 11 to 14
characters for all human-readable levels. Use --no-h if you
want just digits in the sizes, and the old column width of 11
characters.
Compatibility note: when requesting a remote listing of files
from an rsync that is version 2.6.3 or older, you may
encounter an error if you ask for a non-recursive listing.
This is because a file listing implies the --dirs option w/o
--recursive, and older rsyncs don’t have that option. To
avoid this problem, either specify the --no-dirs option (if
you don’t need to expand a directory’s content), or turn on
recursion and exclude the content of subdirectories: -r
--exclude='/*/*'.
--bwlimit=RATE
This option allows you to specify the maximum transfer rate
for the data sent over the socket, specified in units per
second. The RATE value can be suffixed with a string to
indicate a size multiplier, and may be a fractional value
(e.g. "--bwlimit=1.5m"). If no suffix is specified, the
value will be assumed to be in units of 1024 bytes (as if "K"
or "KiB" had been appended). See the --max-size option for a
description of all the available suffixes. A value of zero
specifies no limit.
For backward-compatibility reasons, the rate limit will be
rounded to the nearest KiB unit, so no rate smaller than 1024
bytes per second is possible.
Rsync writes data over the socket in blocks, and this option
both limits the size of the blocks that rsync writes, and
tries to keep the average transfer rate at the requested
limit. Some "burstiness" may be seen where rsync writes out a
block of data and then sleeps to bring the average rate into
compliance.
Due to the internal buffering of data, the --progress option
may not be an accurate reflection on how fast the data is
being sent. This is because some files can show up as being
rapidly sent when the data is quickly buffered, while other
can show up as very slow when the flushing of the output
buffer occurs. This may be fixed in a future version.
--write-batch=FILE
Record a file that can later be applied to another identical
destination with --read-batch. See the "BATCH MODE" section
for details, and also the --only-write-batch option.
--only-write-batch=FILE
Works like --write-batch, except that no updates are made on
the destination system when creating the batch. This lets you
transport the changes to the destination system via some other
means and then apply the changes via --read-batch.
Note that you can feel free to write the batch directly to
some portable media: if this media fills to capacity before
the end of the transfer, you can just apply that partial
transfer to the destination and repeat the whole process to
get the rest of the changes (as long as you don’t mind a
partially updated destination system while the multi-update
cycle is happening).
Also note that you only save bandwidth when pushing changes to
a remote system because this allows the batched data to be
diverted from the sender into the batch file without having to
flow over the wire to the receiver (when pulling, the sender
is remote, and thus can’t write the batch).
--read-batch=FILE
Apply all of the changes stored in FILE, a file previously
generated by --write-batch. If FILE is -, the batch data will
be read from standard input. See the "BATCH MODE" section for
details.
--protocol=NUM
Force an older protocol version to be used. This is useful
for creating a batch file that is compatible with an older
version of rsync. For instance, if rsync 2.6.4 is being used
with the --write-batch option, but rsync 2.6.3 is what will be
used to run the --read-batch option, you should use
"--protocol=28" when creating the batch file to force the
older protocol version to be used in the batch file (assuming
you can’t upgrade the rsync on the reading system).
--iconv=CONVERT_SPEC
Rsync can convert filenames between character sets using this
option. Using a CONVERT_SPEC of "." tells rsync to look up
the default character-set via the locale setting.
Alternately, you can fully specify what conversion to do by
giving a local and a remote charset separated by a comma in
the order --iconv=LOCAL,REMOTE, e.g. --iconv=utf8,iso88591.
This order ensures that the option will stay the same whether
you’re pushing or pulling files. Finally, you can specify
either --no-iconv or a CONVERT_SPEC of "-" to turn off any
conversion. The default setting of this option is
site-specific, and can also be affected via the RSYNC_ICONV
environment variable.
For a list of what charset names your local iconv library
supports, you can run "iconv --list".
If you specify the --protect-args option (-s), rsync will
translate the filenames you specify on the command-line that
are being sent to the remote host. See also the --files-from
option.
Note that rsync does not do any conversion of names in filter
files (including include/exclude files). It is up to you to
ensure that you’re specifying matching rules that can match on
both sides of the transfer. For instance, you can specify
extra include/exclude rules if there are filename differences
on the two sides that need to be accounted for.
When you pass an --iconv option to an rsync daemon that allows
it, the daemon uses the charset specified in its "charset"
configuration parameter regardless of the remote charset you
actually pass. Thus, you may feel free to specify just the
local charset for a daemon transfer (e.g. --iconv=utf8).
-4, --ipv4 or -6, --ipv6
Tells rsync to prefer IPv4/IPv6 when creating sockets. This
only affects sockets that rsync has direct control over, such
as the outgoing socket when directly contacting an rsync
daemon. See also these options in the --daemon mode section.
If rsync was complied without support for IPv6, the --ipv6
option will have no effect. The --version output will tell
you if this is the case.
--checksum-seed=NUM
Set the checksum seed to the integer NUM. This 4 byte
checksum seed is included in each block and MD4 file checksum
calculation (the more modern MD5 file checksums don’t use a
seed). By default the checksum seed is generated by the
server and defaults to the current time() . This option is
used to set a specific checksum seed, which is useful for
applications that want repeatable block checksums, or in the
case where the user wants a more random checksum seed.
Setting NUM to 0 causes rsync to use the default of time() for
checksum seed.
The options allowed when starting an rsync daemon are as follows:
--daemon
This tells rsync that it is to run as a daemon. The daemon
you start running may be accessed using an rsync client using
the host::module or rsync://host/module/ syntax.
If standard input is a socket then rsync will assume that it
is being run via inetd, otherwise it will detach from the
current terminal and become a background daemon. The daemon
will read the config file (rsyncd.conf) on each connect made
by a client and respond to requests accordingly. See the
rsyncd.conf(5) man page for more details.
--address
By default rsync will bind to the wildcard address when run as
a daemon with the --daemon option. The --address option
allows you to specify a specific IP address (or hostname) to
bind to. This makes virtual hosting possible in conjunction
with the --config option. See also the "address" global
option in the rsyncd.conf manpage.
--bwlimit=RATE
This option allows you to specify the maximum transfer rate
for the data the daemon sends over the socket. The client can
still specify a smaller --bwlimit value, but no larger value
will be allowed. See the client version of this option
(above) for some extra details.
--config=FILE
This specifies an alternate config file than the default.
This is only relevant when --daemon is specified. The default
is /etc/rsyncd.conf unless the daemon is running over a remote
shell program and the remote user is not the super-user; in
that case the default is rsyncd.conf in the current directory
(typically $HOME).
-M, --dparam=OVERRIDE
This option can be used to set a daemon-config parameter when
starting up rsync in daemon mode. It is equivalent to adding
the parameter at the end of the global settings prior to the
first module’s definition. The parameter names can be
specified without spaces, if you so desire. For instance:
rsync --daemon -M pidfile=/path/rsync.pid
--no-detach
When running as a daemon, this option instructs rsync to not
detach itself and become a background process. This option is
required when running as a service on Cygwin, and may also be
useful when rsync is supervised by a program such as
daemontools or AIX’s System Resource Controller. --no-detach
is also recommended when rsync is run under a debugger. This
option has no effect if rsync is run from inetd or sshd.
--port=PORT
This specifies an alternate TCP port number for the daemon to
listen on rather than the default of 873. See also the "port"
global option in the rsyncd.conf manpage.
--log-file=FILE
This option tells the rsync daemon to use the given log-file
name instead of using the "log file" setting in the config
file.
--log-file-format=FORMAT
This option tells the rsync daemon to use the given FORMAT
string instead of using the "log format" setting in the config
file. It also enables "transfer logging" unless the string is
empty, in which case transfer logging is turned off.
--sockopts
This overrides the socket options setting in the rsyncd.conf
file and has the same syntax.
-v, --verbose
This option increases the amount of information the daemon
logs during its startup phase. After the client connects, the
daemon’s verbosity level will be controlled by the options
that the client used and the "max verbosity" setting in the
module’s config section.
-4, --ipv4 or -6, --ipv6
Tells rsync to prefer IPv4/IPv6 when creating the incoming
sockets that the rsync daemon will use to listen for
connections. One of these options may be required in older
versions of Linux to work around an IPv6 bug in the kernel (if
you see an "address already in use" error when nothing else is
using the port, try specifying --ipv6 or --ipv4 when starting
the daemon).
If rsync was complied without support for IPv6, the --ipv6
option will have no effect. The --version output will tell
you if this is the case.
-h, --help
When specified after --daemon, print a short help page
describing the options available for starting an rsync daemon.
The filter rules allow for flexible selection of which files to
transfer (include) and which files to skip (exclude). The rules
either directly specify include/exclude patterns or they specify a
way to acquire more include/exclude patterns (e.g. to read them from
a file).
As the list of files/directories to transfer is built, rsync checks
each name to be transferred against the list of include/exclude
patterns in turn, and the first matching pattern is acted on: if it
is an exclude pattern, then that file is skipped; if it is an include
pattern then that filename is not skipped; if no matching pattern is
found, then the filename is not skipped.
Rsync builds an ordered list of filter rules as specified on the
command-line. Filter rules have the following syntax:
RULE [PATTERN_OR_FILENAME]
RULE,MODIFIERS [PATTERN_OR_FILENAME]
You have your choice of using either short or long RULE names, as
described below. If you use a short-named rule, the ’,’ separating
the RULE from the MODIFIERS is optional. The PATTERN or FILENAME
that follows (when present) must come after either a single space or
an underscore (_). Here are the available rule prefixes:
exclude, - specifies an exclude pattern.
include, + specifies an include pattern.
merge, . specifies a merge-file to read for more rules.
dir-merge, : specifies a per-directory merge-file.
hide, H specifies a pattern for hiding files from the
transfer.
show, S files that match the pattern are not hidden.
protect, P specifies a pattern for protecting files from
deletion.
risk, R files that match the pattern are not protected.
clear, ! clears the current include/exclude list (takes no
arg)
When rules are being read from a file, empty lines are ignored, as
are comment lines that start with a "#".
Note that the --include/--exclude command-line options do not allow
the full range of rule parsing as described above -- they only allow
the specification of include/exclude patterns plus a "!" token to
clear the list (and the normal comment parsing when rules are read
from a file). If a pattern does not begin with "- " (dash, space) or
"+ " (plus, space), then the rule will be interpreted as if "+ " (for
an include option) or "- " (for an exclude option) were prefixed to
the string. A --filter option, on the other hand, must always
contain either a short or long rule name at the start of the rule.
Note also that the --filter, --include, and --exclude options take
one rule/pattern each. To add multiple ones, you can repeat the
options on the command-line, use the merge-file syntax of the
--filter option, or the --include-from/--exclude-from options.
You can include and exclude files by specifying patterns using the
"+", "-", etc. filter rules (as introduced in the FILTER RULES
section above). The include/exclude rules each specify a pattern
that is matched against the names of the files that are going to be
transferred. These patterns can take several forms:
o if the pattern starts with a / then it is anchored to a
particular spot in the hierarchy of files, otherwise it is
matched against the end of the pathname. This is similar to a
leading ^ in regular expressions. Thus "/foo" would match a
name of "foo" at either the "root of the transfer" (for a
global rule) or in the merge-file’s directory (for a
per-directory rule). An unqualified "foo" would match a name
of "foo" anywhere in the tree because the algorithm is applied
recursively from the top down; it behaves as if each path
component gets a turn at being the end of the filename. Even
the unanchored "sub/foo" would match at any point in the
hierarchy where a "foo" was found within a directory named
"sub". See the section on ANCHORING INCLUDE/EXCLUDE PATTERNS
for a full discussion of how to specify a pattern that matches
at the root of the transfer.
o if the pattern ends with a / then it will only match a
directory, not a regular file, symlink, or device.
o rsync chooses between doing a simple string match and wildcard
matching by checking if the pattern contains one of these
three wildcard characters: ’*’, ’?’, and ’[’ .
o a ’*’ matches any path component, but it stops at slashes.
o use ’**’ to match anything, including slashes.
o a ’?’ matches any character except a slash (/).
o a ’[’ introduces a character class, such as [a-z] or
[[:alpha:]].
o in a wildcard pattern, a backslash can be used to escape a
wildcard character, but it is matched literally when no
wildcards are present. This means that there is an extra
level of backslash removal when a pattern contains wildcard
characters compared to a pattern that has none. e.g. if you
add a wildcard to "foo\bar" (which matches the backslash) you
would need to use "foo\\bar*" to avoid the "\b" becoming just
"b".
o if the pattern contains a / (not counting a trailing /) or a
"**", then it is matched against the full pathname, including
any leading directories. If the pattern doesn’t contain a / or
a "**", then it is matched only against the final component of
the filename. (Remember that the algorithm is applied
recursively so "full filename" can actually be any portion of
a path from the starting directory on down.)
o a trailing "dir_name/***" will match both the directory (as if
"dir_name/" had been specified) and everything in the
directory (as if "dir_name/**" had been specified). This
behavior was added in version 2.6.7.
Note that, when using the --recursive (-r) option (which is implied
by -a), every subdir component of every path is visited left to
right, with each directory having a chance for exclusion before its
content. In this way include/exclude patterns are applied
recursively to the pathname of each node in the filesystem’s tree
(those inside the transfer). The exclude patterns short-circuit the
directory traversal stage as rsync finds the files to send.
For instance, to include "/foo/bar/baz", the directories "/foo" and
"/foo/bar" must not be excluded. Excluding one of those parent
directories prevents the examination of its content, cutting off
rsync’s recursion into those paths and rendering the include for
"/foo/bar/baz" ineffectual (since rsync can’t match something it
never sees in the cut-off section of the directory hierarchy).
The concept path exclusion is particularly important when using a
trailing ’*’ rule. For instance, this won’t work:
+ /some/path/this-file-will-not-be-found
+ /file-is-included
- *
This fails because the parent directory "some" is excluded by the ’*’
rule, so rsync never visits any of the files in the "some" or
"some/path" directories. One solution is to ask for all directories
in the hierarchy to be included by using a single rule: "+ */" (put
it somewhere before the "- *" rule), and perhaps use the
--prune-empty-dirs option. Another solution is to add specific
include rules for all the parent dirs that need to be visited. For
instance, this set of rules works fine:
+ /some/
+ /some/path/
+ /some/path/this-file-is-found
+ /file-also-included
- *
Here are some examples of exclude/include matching:
o "- *.o" would exclude all names matching *.o
o "- /foo" would exclude a file (or directory) named foo in the
transfer-root directory
o "- foo/" would exclude any directory named foo
o "- /foo/*/bar" would exclude any file named bar which is at
two levels below a directory named foo in the transfer-root
directory
o "- /foo/**/bar" would exclude any file named bar two or more
levels below a directory named foo in the transfer-root
directory
o The combination of "+ */", "+ *.c", and "- *" would include
all directories and C source files but nothing else (see also
the --prune-empty-dirs option)
o The combination of "+ foo/", "+ foo/bar.c", and "- *" would
include only the foo directory and foo/bar.c (the foo
directory must be explicitly included or it would be excluded
by the "*")
The following modifiers are accepted after a "+" or "-":
o A / specifies that the include/exclude rule should be matched
against the absolute pathname of the current item. For
example, "-/ /etc/passwd" would exclude the passwd file any
time the transfer was sending files from the "/etc" directory,
and "-/ subdir/foo" would always exclude "foo" when it is in a
dir named "subdir", even if "foo" is at the root of the
current transfer.
o A ! specifies that the include/exclude should take effect if
the pattern fails to match. For instance, "-! */" would
exclude all non-directories.
o A C is used to indicate that all the global CVS-exclude rules
should be inserted as excludes in place of the "-C". No arg
should follow.
o An s is used to indicate that the rule applies to the sending
side. When a rule affects the sending side, it prevents files
from being transferred. The default is for a rule to affect
both sides unless --delete-excluded was specified, in which
case default rules become sender-side only. See also the hide
(H) and show (S) rules, which are an alternate way to specify
sending-side includes/excludes.
o An r is used to indicate that the rule applies to the
receiving side. When a rule affects the receiving side, it
prevents files from being deleted. See the s modifier for
more info. See also the protect (P) and risk (R) rules, which
are an alternate way to specify receiver-side
includes/excludes.
o A p indicates that a rule is perishable, meaning that it is
ignored in directories that are being deleted. For instance,
the -C option’s default rules that exclude things like "CVS"
and "*.o" are marked as perishable, and will not prevent a
directory that was removed on the source from being deleted on
the destination.
o An x indicates that a rule affects xattr names in xattr
copy/delete operations (and is thus ignored when matching
file/dir names). If no xattr-matching rules are specified, a
default xattr filtering rule is used (see the --xattrs
option).
You can merge whole files into your filter rules by specifying either
a merge (.) or a dir-merge (:) filter rule (as introduced in the
FILTER RULES section above).
There are two kinds of merged files -- single-instance (’.’) and
per-directory (’:’). A single-instance merge file is read one time,
and its rules are incorporated into the filter list in the place of
the "." rule. For per-directory merge files, rsync will scan every
directory that it traverses for the named file, merging its contents
when the file exists into the current list of inherited rules. These
per-directory rule files must be created on the sending side because
it is the sending side that is being scanned for the available files
to transfer. These rule files may also need to be transferred to the
receiving side if you want them to affect what files don’t get
deleted (see PER-DIRECTORY RULES AND DELETE below).
Some examples:
merge /etc/rsync/default.rules
. /etc/rsync/default.rules
dir-merge .per-dir-filter
dir-merge,n- .non-inherited-per-dir-excludes
:n- .non-inherited-per-dir-excludes
The following modifiers are accepted after a merge or dir-merge rule:
o A - specifies that the file should consist of only exclude
patterns, with no other rule-parsing except for in-file
comments.
o A + specifies that the file should consist of only include
patterns, with no other rule-parsing except for in-file
comments.
o A C is a way to specify that the file should be read in a
CVS-compatible manner. This turns on ’n’, ’w’, and ’-’, but
also allows the list-clearing token (!) to be specified. If
no filename is provided, ".cvsignore" is assumed.
o A e will exclude the merge-file name from the transfer; e.g.
"dir-merge,e .rules" is like "dir-merge .rules" and "-
.rules".
o An n specifies that the rules are not inherited by
subdirectories.
o A w specifies that the rules are word-split on whitespace
instead of the normal line-splitting. This also turns off
comments. Note: the space that separates the prefix from the
rule is treated specially, so "- foo + bar" is parsed as two
rules (assuming that prefix-parsing wasn’t also disabled).
o You may also specify any of the modifiers for the "+" or "-"
rules (above) in order to have the rules that are read in from
the file default to having that modifier set (except for the !
modifier, which would not be useful). For instance, "merge,-/
.excl" would treat the contents of .excl as absolute-path
excludes, while "dir-merge,s .filt" and ":sC" would each make
all their per-directory rules apply only on the sending side.
If the merge rule specifies sides to affect (via the s or r
modifier or both), then the rules in the file must not specify
sides (via a modifier or a rule prefix such as hide).
Per-directory rules are inherited in all subdirectories of the
directory where the merge-file was found unless the ’n’ modifier was
used. Each subdirectory’s rules are prefixed to the inherited
per-directory rules from its parents, which gives the newest rules a
higher priority than the inherited rules. The entire set of
dir-merge rules are grouped together in the spot where the merge-file
was specified, so it is possible to override dir-merge rules via a
rule that got specified earlier in the list of global rules. When
the list-clearing rule ("!") is read from a per-directory file, it
only clears the inherited rules for the current merge file.
Another way to prevent a single rule from a dir-merge file from being
inherited is to anchor it with a leading slash. Anchored rules in a
per-directory merge-file are relative to the merge-file’s directory,
so a pattern "/foo" would only match the file "foo" in the directory
where the dir-merge filter file was found.
Here’s an example filter file which you’d specify via --filter=".
file":
merge /home/user/.global-filter
- *.gz
dir-merge .rules
+ *.[ch]
- *.o
This will merge the contents of the /home/user/.global-filter file at
the start of the list and also turns the ".rules" filename into a
per-directory filter file. All rules read in prior to the start of
the directory scan follow the global anchoring rules (i.e. a leading
slash matches at the root of the transfer).
If a per-directory merge-file is specified with a path that is a
parent directory of the first transfer directory, rsync will scan all
the parent dirs from that starting point to the transfer directory
for the indicated per-directory file. For instance, here is a common
filter (see -F):
--filter=': /.rsync-filter'
That rule tells rsync to scan for the file .rsync-filter in all
directories from the root down through the parent directory of the
transfer prior to the start of the normal directory scan of the file
in the directories that are sent as a part of the transfer. (Note:
for an rsync daemon, the root is always the same as the module’s
"path".)
Some examples of this pre-scanning for per-directory files:
rsync -avF /src/path/ /dest/dir
rsync -av --filter=': ../../.rsync-filter' /src/path/
/dest/dir
rsync -av --filter=': .rsync-filter' /src/path/ /dest/dir
The first two commands above will look for ".rsync-filter" in "/" and
"/src" before the normal scan begins looking for the file in
"/src/path" and its subdirectories. The last command avoids the
parent-dir scan and only looks for the ".rsync-filter" files in each
directory that is a part of the transfer.
If you want to include the contents of a ".cvsignore" in your
patterns, you should use the rule ":C", which creates a dir-merge of
the .cvsignore file, but parsed in a CVS-compatible manner. You can
use this to affect where the --cvs-exclude (-C) option’s inclusion of
the per-directory .cvsignore file gets placed into your rules by
putting the ":C" wherever you like in your filter rules. Without
this, rsync would add the dir-merge rule for the .cvsignore file at
the end of all your other rules (giving it a lower priority than your
command-line rules). For example:
cat <<EOT | rsync -avC --filter='. -' a/ b
+ foo.o
:C
- *.old
EOT
rsync -avC --include=foo.o -f :C --exclude='*.old' a/ b
Both of the above rsync commands are identical. Each one will merge
all the per-directory .cvsignore rules in the middle of the list
rather than at the end. This allows their dir-specific rules to
supersede the rules that follow the :C instead of being subservient
to all your rules. To affect the other CVS exclude rules (i.e. the
default list of exclusions, the contents of $HOME/.cvsignore, and the
value of $CVSIGNORE) you should omit the -C command-line option and
instead insert a "-C" rule into your filter rules; e.g.
"--filter=-C".
You can clear the current include/exclude list by using the "!"
filter rule (as introduced in the FILTER RULES section above). The
"current" list is either the global list of rules (if the rule is
encountered while parsing the filter options) or a set of
per-directory rules (which are inherited in their own sub-list, so a
subdirectory can use this to clear out the parent’s rules).
As mentioned earlier, global include/exclude patterns are anchored at
the "root of the transfer" (as opposed to per-directory patterns,
which are anchored at the merge-file’s directory). If you think of
the transfer as a subtree of names that are being sent from sender to
receiver, the transfer-root is where the tree starts to be duplicated
in the destination directory. This root governs where patterns that
start with a / match.
Because the matching is relative to the transfer-root, changing the
trailing slash on a source path or changing your use of the
--relative option affects the path you need to use in your matching
(in addition to changing how much of the file tree is duplicated on
the destination host). The following examples demonstrate this.
Let’s say that we want to match two source files, one with an
absolute path of "/home/me/foo/bar", and one with a path of
"/home/you/bar/baz". Here is how the various command choices differ
for a 2-source transfer:
Example cmd: rsync -a /home/me /home/you /dest
+/- pattern: /me/foo/bar
+/- pattern: /you/bar/baz
Target file: /dest/me/foo/bar
Target file: /dest/you/bar/baz
Example cmd: rsync -a /home/me/ /home/you/ /dest
+/- pattern: /foo/bar (note missing "me")
+/- pattern: /bar/baz (note missing "you")
Target file: /dest/foo/bar
Target file: /dest/bar/baz
Example cmd: rsync -a --relative /home/me/ /home/you /dest
+/- pattern: /home/me/foo/bar (note full path)
+/- pattern: /home/you/bar/baz (ditto)
Target file: /dest/home/me/foo/bar
Target file: /dest/home/you/bar/baz
Example cmd: cd /home; rsync -a --relative me/foo you/ /dest
+/- pattern: /me/foo/bar (starts at specified path)
+/- pattern: /you/bar/baz (ditto)
Target file: /dest/me/foo/bar
Target file: /dest/you/bar/baz
The easiest way to see what name you should filter is to just look at
the output when using --verbose and put a / in front of the name (use
the --dry-run option if you’re not yet ready to copy any files).
Without a delete option, per-directory rules are only relevant on the
sending side, so you can feel free to exclude the merge files
themselves without affecting the transfer. To make this easy, the
’e’ modifier adds this exclude for you, as seen in these two
equivalent commands:
rsync -av --filter=': .excl' --exclude=.excl host:src/dir
/dest
rsync -av --filter=':e .excl' host:src/dir /dest
However, if you want to do a delete on the receiving side AND you
want some files to be excluded from being deleted, you’ll need to be
sure that the receiving side knows what files to exclude. The
easiest way is to include the per-directory merge files in the
transfer and use --delete-after, because this ensures that the
receiving side gets all the same exclude rules as the sending side
before it tries to delete anything:
rsync -avF --delete-after host:src/dir /dest
However, if the merge files are not a part of the transfer, you’ll
need to either specify some global exclude rules (i.e. specified on
the command line), or you’ll need to maintain your own per-directory
merge files on the receiving side. An example of the first is this
(assume that the remote .rules files exclude themselves):
rsync -av --filter=’: .rules’ --filter=’. /my/extra.rules’
--delete host:src/dir /dest
In the above example the extra.rules file can affect both sides of
the transfer, but (on the sending side) the rules are subservient to
the rules merged from the .rules files because they were specified
after the per-directory merge rule.
In one final example, the remote side is excluding the .rsync-filter
files from the transfer, but we want to use our own .rsync-filter
files to control what gets deleted on the receiving side. To do this
we must specifically exclude the per-directory merge files (so that
they don’t get deleted) and then put rules into the local files to
control what else should not get deleted. Like one of these
commands:
rsync -av --filter=':e /.rsync-filter' --delete \
host:src/dir /dest
rsync -avFF --delete host:src/dir /dest
Batch mode can be used to apply the same set of updates to many
identical systems. Suppose one has a tree which is replicated on a
number of hosts. Now suppose some changes have been made to this
source tree and those changes need to be propagated to the other
hosts. In order to do this using batch mode, rsync is run with the
write-batch option to apply the changes made to the source tree to
one of the destination trees. The write-batch option causes the
rsync client to store in a "batch file" all the information needed to
repeat this operation against other, identical destination trees.
Generating the batch file once saves having to perform the file
status, checksum, and data block generation more than once when
updating multiple destination trees. Multicast transport protocols
can be used to transfer the batch update files in parallel to many
hosts at once, instead of sending the same data to every host
individually.
To apply the recorded changes to another destination tree, run rsync
with the read-batch option, specifying the name of the same batch
file, and the destination tree. Rsync updates the destination tree
using the information stored in the batch file.
For your convenience, a script file is also created when the
write-batch option is used: it will be named the same as the batch
file with ".sh" appended. This script file contains a command-line
suitable for updating a destination tree using the associated batch
file. It can be executed using a Bourne (or Bourne-like) shell,
optionally passing in an alternate destination tree pathname which is
then used instead of the original destination path. This is useful
when the destination tree path on the current host differs from the
one used to create the batch file.
Examples:
$ rsync --write-batch=foo -a host:/source/dir/ /adest/dir/
$ scp foo* remote:
$ ssh remote ./foo.sh /bdest/dir/
$ rsync --write-batch=foo -a /source/dir/ /adest/dir/
$ ssh remote rsync --read-batch=- -a /bdest/dir/ <foo
In these examples, rsync is used to update /adest/dir/ from
/source/dir/ and the information to repeat this operation is stored
in "foo" and "foo.sh". The host "remote" is then updated with the
batched data going into the directory /bdest/dir. The differences
between the two examples reveals some of the flexibility you have in
how you deal with batches:
o The first example shows that the initial copy doesn’t have to
be local -- you can push or pull data to/from a remote host
using either the remote-shell syntax or rsync daemon syntax,
as desired.
o The first example uses the created "foo.sh" file to get the
right rsync options when running the read-batch command on the
remote host.
o The second example reads the batch data via standard input so
that the batch file doesn’t need to be copied to the remote
machine first. This example avoids the foo.sh script because
it needed to use a modified --read-batch option, but you could
edit the script file if you wished to make use of it (just be
sure that no other option is trying to use standard input,
such as the "--exclude-from=-" option).
Caveats:
The read-batch option expects the destination tree that it is
updating to be identical to the destination tree that was used to
create the batch update fileset. When a difference between the
destination trees is encountered the update might be discarded with a
warning (if the file appears to be up-to-date already) or the
file-update may be attempted and then, if the file fails to verify,
the update discarded with an error. This means that it should be
safe to re-run a read-batch operation if the command got interrupted.
If you wish to force the batched-update to always be attempted
regardless of the file’s size and date, use the -I option (when
reading the batch). If an error occurs, the destination tree will
probably be in a partially updated state. In that case, rsync can be
used in its regular (non-batch) mode of operation to fix up the
destination tree.
The rsync version used on all destinations must be at least as new as
the one used to generate the batch file. Rsync will die with an
error if the protocol version in the batch file is too new for the
batch-reading rsync to handle. See also the --protocol option for a
way to have the creating rsync generate a batch file that an older
rsync can understand. (Note that batch files changed format in
version 2.6.3, so mixing versions older than that with newer versions
will not work.)
When reading a batch file, rsync will force the value of certain
options to match the data in the batch file if you didn’t set them to
the same as the batch-writing command. Other options can (and
should) be changed. For instance --write-batch changes to
--read-batch, --files-from is dropped, and the
--filter/--include/--exclude options are not needed unless one of the
--delete options is specified.
The code that creates the BATCH.sh file transforms any
filter/include/exclude options into a single list that is appended as
a "here" document to the shell script file. An advanced user can use
this to modify the exclude list if a change in what gets deleted by
--delete is desired. A normal user can ignore this detail and just
use the shell script as an easy way to run the appropriate
--read-batch command for the batched data.
The original batch mode in rsync was based on "rsync+", but the
latest version uses a new implementation.
Three basic behaviors are possible when rsync encounters a symbolic
link in the source directory.
By default, symbolic links are not transferred at all. A message
"skipping non-regular" file is emitted for any symlinks that exist.
If --links is specified, then symlinks are recreated with the same
target on the destination. Note that --archive implies --links.
If --copy-links is specified, then symlinks are "collapsed" by
copying their referent, rather than the symlink.
Rsync can also distinguish "safe" and "unsafe" symbolic links. An
example where this might be used is a web site mirror that wishes to
ensure that the rsync module that is copied does not include symbolic
links to /etc/passwd in the public section of the site. Using
--copy-unsafe-links will cause any links to be copied as the file
they point to on the destination. Using --safe-links will cause
unsafe links to be omitted altogether. (Note that you must specify
--links for --safe-links to have any effect.)
Symbolic links are considered unsafe if they are absolute symlinks
(start with /), empty, or if they contain enough ".." components to
ascend from the directory being copied.
Here’s a summary of how the symlink options are interpreted. The
list is in order of precedence, so if your combination of options
isn’t mentioned, use the first line that is a complete subset of your
options:
--copy-links
Turn all symlinks into normal files (leaving no symlinks for
any other options to affect).
--links --copy-unsafe-links
Turn all unsafe symlinks into files and duplicate all safe
symlinks.
--copy-unsafe-links
Turn all unsafe symlinks into files, noisily skip all safe
symlinks.
--links --safe-links
Duplicate safe symlinks and skip unsafe ones.
--links
Duplicate all symlinks.
rsync occasionally produces error messages that may seem a little
cryptic. The one that seems to cause the most confusion is "protocol
version mismatch -- is your shell clean?".
This message is usually caused by your startup scripts or remote
shell facility producing unwanted garbage on the stream that rsync is
using for its transport. The way to diagnose this problem is to run
your remote shell like this:
ssh remotehost /bin/true > out.dat
then look at out.dat. If everything is working correctly then out.dat
should be a zero length file. If you are getting the above error from
rsync then you will probably find that out.dat contains some text or
data. Look at the contents and try to work out what is producing it.
The most common cause is incorrectly configured shell startup scripts
(such as .cshrc or .profile) that contain output statements for
non-interactive logins.
If you are having trouble debugging filter patterns, then try
specifying the -vv option. At this level of verbosity rsync will
show why each individual file is included or excluded.
0 Success
1 Syntax or usage error
2 Protocol incompatibility
3 Errors selecting input/output files, dirs
4 Requested action not supported: an attempt was made to
manipulate 64-bit files on a platform that cannot support
them; or an option was specified that is supported by the
client and not by the server.
5 Error starting client-server protocol
6 Daemon unable to append to log-file
10 Error in socket I/O
11 Error in file I/O
12 Error in rsync protocol data stream
13 Errors with program diagnostics
14 Error in IPC code
20 Received SIGUSR1 or SIGINT
21 Some error returned by waitpid()
22 Error allocating core memory buffers
23 Partial transfer due to error
24 Partial transfer due to vanished source files
25 The --max-delete limit stopped deletions
30 Timeout in data send/receive
35 Timeout waiting for daemon connection
CVSIGNORE
The CVSIGNORE environment variable supplements any ignore
patterns in .cvsignore files. See the --cvs-exclude option for
more details.
RSYNC_ICONV
Specify a default --iconv setting using this environment
variable. (First supported in 3.0.0.)
RSYNC_PROTECT_ARGS
Specify a non-zero numeric value if you want the
--protect-args option to be enabled by default, or a zero
value to make sure that it is disabled by default. (First
supported in 3.1.0.)
RSYNC_RSH
The RSYNC_RSH environment variable allows you to override the
default shell used as the transport for rsync. Command line
options are permitted after the command name, just as in the
-e option.
RSYNC_PROXY
The RSYNC_PROXY environment variable allows you to redirect
your rsync client to use a web proxy when connecting to a
rsync daemon. You should set RSYNC_PROXY to a hostname:port
pair.
RSYNC_PASSWORD
Setting RSYNC_PASSWORD to the required password allows you to
run authenticated rsync connections to an rsync daemon without
user intervention. Note that this does not supply a password
to a remote shell transport such as ssh; to learn how to do
that, consult the remote shell’s documentation.
USER or LOGNAME
The USER or LOGNAME environment variables are used to
determine the default username sent to an rsync daemon. If
neither is set, the username defaults to "nobody".
HOME The HOME environment variable is used to find the user’s
default .cvsignore file.
/etc/rsyncd.conf or rsyncd.conf
rsyncd.conf(5)
times are transferred as *nix time_t values
When transferring to FAT filesystems rsync may re-sync unmodified
files. See the comments on the --modify-window option.
file permissions, devices, etc. are transferred as native numerical
values
see also the comments on the --delete option
Please report bugs! See the web site at http://rsync.samba.org/
This man page is current for version 3.1.3 of rsync.
The options --server and --sender are used internally by rsync, and
should never be typed by a user under normal circumstances. Some
awareness of these options may be needed in certain scenarios, such
as when setting up a login that can only run an rsync command. For
instance, the support directory of the rsync distribution has an
example script named rrsync (for restricted rsync) that can be used
with a restricted ssh login.
rsync is distributed under the GNU General Public License. See the
file COPYING for details.
A WEB site is available at http://rsync.samba.org/. The site
includes an FAQ-O-Matic which may cover questions unanswered by this
manual page.
The primary ftp site for rsync is ftp://rsync.samba.org/pub/rsync.
We would be delighted to hear from you if you like this program.
Please contact the mailing-list at rsync@lists.samba.org.
This program uses the excellent zlib compression library written by
Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler.
Special thanks go out to: John Van Essen, Matt McCutchen, Wesley W.
Terpstra, David Dykstra, Jos Backus, Sebastian Krahmer, Martin Pool,
and our gone-but-not-forgotten compadre, J.W. Schultz.
Thanks also to Richard Brent, Brendan Mackay, Bill Waite, Stephen
Rothwell and David Bell. I’ve probably missed some people, my
apologies if I have.
rsync was originally written by Andrew Tridgell and Paul Mackerras.
Many people have later contributed to it. It is currently maintained
by Wayne Davison.
Mailing lists for support and development are available at
http://lists.samba.org
This page is part of the rsync (a fast, versatile, remote (and local)
file-copying tool) project. Information about the project can be
found at ⟨https://rsync.samba.org/⟩. If you have a bug report for
this manual page, see ⟨https://rsync.samba.org/bugzilla.html⟩. This
page was obtained from the tarball fetched from
⟨https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/⟩ on 2018-02-02. If you dis‐
cover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or
you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
to man-pages@man7.org
28 Jan 2018 rsync(1)
Pages that refer to this page: pmlogger_check(1), rsyncd.conf(5)
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