a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool
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-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.
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-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.
Note that the names of the transferred files that are output are done using a default --out-format
of "%n%L", which tells you just the name of the file and, if the item is a link, where it points.
At the single -v level of verbosity, this does not mention when a file gets its attributes
changed. If you ask for an itemized list of changed attributes (either --itemize-changes or
adding "%i" to the --out-format setting), the output (on the client) increases to mention all
items that are changed in any way. See the --out-format option for more details.
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-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.
See the --skip-compress option for the default list of file suffixes that will not be compressed.
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-h, --human-readable
Output numbers in a more human-readable format. This makes big numbers output using larger units,
with a K, M, or G suffix. If this option was specified once, these units are K (1000), M
(1000*1000), and G (1000*1000*1000); if the option is repeated, the units are powers of 1024
instead of 1000.
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--progress
This option tells rsync to print information showing the progress of the transfer. This gives a
bored user something to watch. Implies --verbose if it wasn’t already specified.
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:
1238099 100% 146.38kB/s 0:00:08 (xfer#5, to-check=169/396)
In this example, the file was 1238099 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.
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--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.
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.
o Number of files transferred is the count of normal files that were updated via rsync’s
delta-transfer algorithm, which does not include created dirs, symlinks, etc.
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.
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