rsync is a program that behaves in much the same way that rcp does, but has many more options and uses the rsync remote-update protocol to greatly speedup file transfers when the destination file already exists. The rsync home page has more information.
rsync-2.5.6: description + notes
The rsync remote-update protocol lets rsync transfer just the differences between two sets of files across the network link, using an efficient checksum-search algorithm described in the technical report that accompanies this package.
Some of the additional features of rsync are:
- support for copying links, devices, owners, groups and permissions
- exclude and exclude-from options similar to GNU tar
- a CVS exclude mode for ignoring the same files that CVS would ignore
- can use any transparent remote shell, including rsh or ssh
- does not require root privileges
- pipelining of file transfers to minimize latency costs
- support for anonymous or authenticated rsync servers (ideal for mirroring)
Note: this is not the same program as /usr/sbin/rsync. An error message like:
rsync: ERROR: Illegal option -- - usage: rsync _c_command _r_rcsdir _Rv dirname_... EOF in read_timeoutusually means that the wrong rsync was found on the remote machine, either because the freeware rsync wasn't installed, or because of PATH problems (see the --rsync-path option). This build uses--rsync-path=/usr/freeware/bin/rsyncby default.
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