The thing that MH said, without explicitly saying it, was that having the / at the end of the source ‘file’ tells rsync to sync the directory’s CONTENTS, not the directory.

That is to say that this:

                rsync –av ~ someone@somewhere:/home/someone

And this:

                rsync –av ~/ someone@somewhere:/home/someone

Are seriously different.  The former will place ‘~’ inside /home/someone (if current user is ‘me’, then there will be a directory called ‘me’ in /home/someone which is a copy of ‘~’), whereas the latter will result in the CONTENTS of ‘~’ on the local machine being copied to /home/someone on the remote machine.  At least, if I remember the rsync man page right J.

One further note.  This:

                rsync –av ~ someone@somewhere:/home/someone

and this:

                rsync –av ~ someone@somewhere:

Should result in the identical results, assuming that ‘someone’s home directory on ‘somewhere’ is /home/someone.

Rusty

From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Michael Havens
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2012 7:17 AM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: merge documents with scp

your great ET.I figured out that to do it  rsync <file x> <file y>.  I just had to realize that '<user>@<address>:' is just part of the file name

On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 7:06 AM, Michael Havens  wrote:

ahhhhh heck. that was simple.

  rsync -av ~/ <user2>@address2>/home/xyz

But still.... it takes a long time to finish. Oh I get it..... I forgot to empty my trash!

(I *hate* it when my trash is full! ;-)