rsync

Print a short help page describing the options available in rsync and exit. You can also use -h for --help when it is used without any other options (since it normally means --human-readable).

Print the rsync version plus other info and exit. When repeated, the information is output is a JSON format that is still fairly readable (client side only).

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.

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:

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:

This option controls which processes output to stderr and if info messages are also changed to stderr. The mode strings can be abbreviated, so feel free to use a single letter value. The 3 possible choices are:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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, so this can slow things down significantly (and this is prior to any reading that will be done to transfer changed file

This is equivalent to -rlptgoD. It is a quick way of saying you want recursion and want to preserve almost everything. Be aware that it does not include preserving ACLs (-A), xattrs (-X), atimes (-U), crtimes (-N), nor the finding and preserving of hardlinks (-H).

You may turn off one or more implied options by prefixing the option name with "no-". Not all positive options have a negated opposite, but a lot do, including those that can be used to disable an implied option (e.g. --no-D, --no-perms) or have different defaults in various circumstances (e.g. --no-whole-file, --no-blocking-io, --no-dirs). Every valid negated option accepts both the short and the long option name after the "no-" prefix (e.g. --no-R is the same as --no-relative).

This tells rsync to copy directories recursively. See also --dirs (-d) for an option that allows the scanning of a single directory.

This option explicitly enables on incremental recursion when scanning for files, which is enabled by default when using the --recursive option and both sides of the transfer are running rsync 3.0.0 or newer.

Disables the new incremental recursion algorithm of the --recursive option. This makes rsync scan the full file list before it begins to transfer files. See --inc-recursive for more info.

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:

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.

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.

This implies the --backup option, and 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).

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.

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.)

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 special copy mode only works to efficiently update files that are known to be growing larger where any existing content on the receiving side is also known to be the same as the content on the sender. The use of --append can be dangerous if you aren't 100% sure that all the files in the transfer are shared, growing files. You should thus use filter rules to ensure that you weed out any files that do not fit this criteria.

This special copy mode works like --append except that all the data in the file is included in the checksum verification (making it less efficient but also potentially safer). This option can be dangerous if you aren't 100% sure that all the files in the transfer are shared, growing files. See the --append option for more details.

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.

Create all missing path components of the destination path.

Add symlinks to the transferred files instead of noisily ignoring them with a "non-regular file" warning for each symlink encountered. You can alternately silence the warning by specifying --info=nonreg0.

The sender transforms each symlink encountered in the transfer into the referent item, following the symlink chain to the file or directory that it references. If a symlink chain is broken, an error is output and the file is dropped from the transfer.

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 tells the receiving rsync to ignore any symbolic links in the transfer which point outside the copied tree. All absolute symlinks are also ignored.

This option affects just one side of the transfer and tells rsync to munge symlink values when it is receiving files or unmunge symlink values when it is sending files. The munged values make the symlinks unusable on disk but allows the original contents of the symlinks to be recovered.

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.

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.

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 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.)

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:

This option causes rsync to update the destination ACLs to be the same as the source ACLs. The option also implies --perms.

This option causes rsync to update the destination extended attributes to be the same as the source ones.

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.

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.

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.

This option causes rsync to transfer character and block device files to the remote system to recreate these devices. If the receiving rsync is not being run as the super-user, rsync silently skips creating the device files (see also the --super and --fake-super options).

This option causes rsync to transfer special files, such as named sockets and fifos. If the receiving rsync is not being run as the super-user, rsync silently skips creating the special files (see also the --super and --fake-super options).

The -D option is equivalent to "--devices --specials".

This tells rsync to treat a device on the sending side as a regular file, allowing it to be copied to a normal destination file (or another device if --write-devices was also specified).

This tells rsync to treat a device on the receiving side as a regular file, allowing the writing of file data into a device.

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 --ignore-times (-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).

This tells rsync to set the access (use) times of the destination files to the same value as the source files.

This tells rsync to open files with the O_NOATIME flag (on systems that support it) to avoid changing the access time of the files that are being transferred. If your OS does not support the O_NOATIME flag then rsync will silently ignore this option. Note also that some filesystems are mounted to avoid updating the atime on read access even without the O_NOATIME flag being set.

This tells rsync to set the create times (newness) of the destination files to the same value as the source files. Your OS & filesystem must support the setting of arbitrary creation (birth) times for this option to be supported.

This tells rsync to omit directories when it is preserving modification, access, and create 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 tells rsync to omit symlinks when it is preserving modification, access, and create times.

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 --group 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.

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

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.

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.

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 --verbose (-v) and/or --itemize-changes (-i) options to see what an rsync command is going to do before one actually runs it.

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.

Disable whole-file updating when it is enabled by default for a local transfer. This usually slows rsync down, but it can be useful if you are trying to minimize the writes to the destination file (if combined with --inplace) or for testing the checksum-based update algorithm.

This option overrides the checksum algorithms. If one algorithm name is specified, it is used for both the transfer checksums and (assuming --checksum is specified) the pre-transfer checksums. If two comma-separated names are supplied, the first name affects the transfer checksums, and the second name affects the pre-transfer checksums (-c).

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.

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 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 --ignore-non-existing.

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.

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 ma

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.

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.

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). I

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.

This option turns any unqualified exclude/include rules into server-side rules that do not affect the receiver's deletions.

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.

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.

Tells --delete to go ahead and delete files even when there are I/O errors.

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).

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).

This tells rsync to avoid transferring any file that is larger than the specified SIZE. A numeric value can be suffixed with a string to indicate the numeric units or left unqualified to specify bytes. Feel free to use a fractional value along with the units, such as --max-size=1.5m.

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 info.

By default rsync limits an individual malloc/realloc to about 1GB in size. For most people this limit works just fine and prevents a protocol error causing rsync to request massive amounts of memory. However, if you have many millions of files in a transfer, a large amount of server memory, and you don't want to split up your transfer into multiple parts, you can increase the per-allocation limit to something larger and rsync will consume more memory.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

This option is a simplified form of the --filter option that specifies an exclude rule and does not allow the full rule-parsing syntax of normal filter rules. This is equivalent to specifying -f'- PATTERN'.

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 are ignored, as are whole-line comments that start with ';' or '#' (filename rules that contain those characters are unaffected).

This option is a simplified form of the --filter option that specifies an include rule and does not allow the full rule-parsing syntax of normal filter rules. This is equivalent to specifying -f'+ PATTERN'.

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 are ignored, as are whole-line comments that start with ';' or '#' (filename rules that contain those characters are unaffected).

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:

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).

This option tells rsync to stop trying to protect the arg values on the remote side from unintended word-splitting or other misinterpretation. It also allows the client to treat an empty arg as a "." instead of generating an error.

This option sends all filenames and most options to the remote rsync via the protocol (not the remote shell command line) which avoids letting the remote shell modify them. Wildcards are expanded on the remote host by rsync instead of a shell.

This option disables two extra validation checks that a local client performs on the file list generated by a remote sender. This option should only be used if you trust the sender to not put something malicious in the file list (something that could possibly be done via a modified rsync, a modified shell, or some other similar manipulation).

This option instructs rsync to use the USER and (if specified after a colon) the GROUP for the copy operations. This only works if the user that is running rsync has the ability to change users. If the group is not specified then the user's default groups are used.

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 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

This option can be used to override the automatic negotiation of the compression algorithm that occurs when --compress is used. The option implies --compress unless "none" was specified, which instead implies --no-compress.

Explicitly set the compression level to use (see --compress, -z) instead of letting it default. The --compress option is implied as long as the level chosen is not a "don't compress" level for the compression algorithm that is in effect (e.g. zlib compression treats level 0 as "off").

NOTE: no compression method currently supports per-file compression changes, so this option has no effect.

With this option rsync will transfer numeric group and user IDs rather than using user and group names and mapping them at both ends.

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 ran

This option forces all files to be owned by USER with group GROUP. This is a simpler interface than using --usermap & --groupmap directly, but it is implemented using those options internally so they cannot be mixed. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 manpage 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 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.)

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Output numbers in a more human-readable format. There are 3 possible levels:

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.

This option modifies the behavior of the --partial option while also implying that it be enabled. This enhanced partial-file method puts any partially transferred files into the specified DIR instead of writing the partial file 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.

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 rs

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.

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).

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.

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 allows rsync to send up to 5K of data to the "early exec" script on its stdin. One possible use of this data is to give the script a secret that can be used to mount an encrypted filesystem (which you should unmount in the the "post-xfer exec" script).

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:

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 0 specifies no limit.

This option tells rsync to stop copying when the specified number of minutes has elapsed.

This option tells rsync to stop copying when the specified point in time has been reached. The date & time can be fully specified in a numeric format of year-month-dayThour:minute (e.g. 2000-12-31T23:59) in the local timezone. You may choose to separate the date numbers using slashes instead of dashes.

Cause the receiving side to fsync each finished file. This may slow down the transfer, but can help to provide peace of mind when updating critical files.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 c

Tells rsync to prefer IPv4/IPv6 when creating sockets or running ssh. This affects sockets that rsync has direct control over, such as the outgoing socket when directly contacting an rsync daemon, as well as the forwarding of the -4 or -6 option to ssh when rsync can deduce that ssh is being used as the remote shell. For other remote shells you'll need to specify the "--rsh SHELL -4" option directly (or whatever IPv4/IPv6 hint options it uses).

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.

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.

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).

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:

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.

This overrides the socket options setting in the rsyncd.conf file and has the same syntax.

When specified after --daemon, print a short help page describing the options available for starting an rsync daemon.

Turn all symlinks into normal files and directories (leaving no symlinks in the transfer for any other options to affect).

Turn just symlinks to directories into real directories, leaving all other symlinks to be handled as described below.

Turn all unsafe symlinks into files and create all safe symlinks.

The receiver skips creating unsafe symlinks found in the transfer and creates the safe ones.

Create all symlinks.