My case is the exact opposite of what you are talking about. Irrespectively of the original files, i want to keep the existing files at the destination, even if older.
and cp --reply=no, without any other fancy thing that would have avoided a prompt, was the sweetest thing to do. it was... :( cheers -Alessandro On 8/25/07, Bob Proulx <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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 > -- Anche i masochisti confessano se torturati. Lo fanno per riconoscenza. (Stanislaw J. Lec) A l e s s a n d r o S a l v a t o r i _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils