On Thu, 24 Jan 2013, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au>
Whilst I did learn a thing or two with this thread, thank you very much, I am astounded that you can seem to have no trouble reading Wikipedia articles to attack people, but you can't seem to read a man page?
It's not the first time something so basic about a Linux tool or operation has escaped your vast experience and that really surprises me.
linux is complex. as are many of the command line tools and there are thousands of them (with perhaps only a few dozen being so generically useful that they're used daily). it is impossible to know every thing there is to know about linux or the software that runs on it (incl. knowledge about either the existence of particular tools or of some of the more specialised/obscure options and capabilites that they have). i've been using unix and linux for over 20 years - so long that i barely remember what computers were like pre-linux. I consider myself to be an expert in several areas of linux knowledge and practice and profoundly ignorant in others. Just like Russell, and just like the handful of people on this list that I consider to be near, at, or above my own level of skill (for the record - you're not one of them), and just like every other highly capable member of the linux community. I'm still learning new things and new variations of things I already knew all the time - it's one of the things i like best about linux...both the continuous discovery/learning process and the pleasant surprise when I need to do something new or unusual and realise that someone else already thought of that and there's a tool or option to do it (or something very like what I need which can do the job with a little hacking - or, at worst, borrow their ideas/methods and adapt them) i've been using rsync routinely for over 15 years, at least since it was first packaged for debian in 1996 and i had no idea that it had batch capabilities. it's not a feature i've ever needed. like a lot of software, rsync has many specialised capabilities that are only of interest in particular use-cases. i knew about --dry-run (use it all the time, and it's a very useful option on several other tools including patch), but not about --itemize-changes, which sounds like it might be useful, as i tend to use --verbose and redirect output to a log file anyway (for viewing with less or tail -f or grepping). so, i'm not in the least bit surprised that Russell didn't know about some of rsync's options. it's not unusual, or even worth comment on. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>