Re: what will happen to the --reply option?

[Bob Proulx]

Eric Blake wrote:
> Why not use "rsync --ignore-existing" instead?

Agreed that rsync is definitely the right tool for this task.

Most of the time when people are trying to avoid overwriting existing
files it is because they are trying to avoid spending the computer
time to do the copy again and not trying to avoid changing the file
again.  A large directory of large files, say a photo gallery, can
take a long time to complete a full copy for example.  In which case I
would not use the rsync --ignore-existing option even though it does
exactly answer the question.  That would not sync the file if the file
were different.  Instead I would simply let rsync determine that the
file has been copied correctly previously and skip copying it a second
time.  This is the sweet spot for rsync.

To have rsync do this optimization the timestamp must be copied.  That
means that -t option must be present otherwise rsync acts similarly to
cp and the file will have a current timestamp.  I prefer -a because it
does the right thing and is equivalent to the -rlptgoD options.

  rsync -a source/ destination/

I prefer to use source to destdir/

  rsync -a /path/to/src/somedir /path/to/dst/

That would result in /path/to/dst/somedir when the rsync is finished.

Bob