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.
rsync-2.1.0: description + notes
The rsync remote-update protocol allows rsync to 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_timeout usually 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).
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