You might not even like rsync. Yeah it’s old. Yeah it’s slow. But if you’re working with Linux you’re going to need to know it.
In this video I walk through my favorite everyday flags for rsync.
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Here’s a companion blog post, where I cover a bit more detail: https://vkc.sh/everyday-rsync
Also, @BreadOnPenguins made an awesome rsync video and you should check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eifQI5uD6VQ
Lastly, I left out all of the ssh setup stuff because I made a video about that and the blog post goes into a smidge more detail. If you want to see a video covering the basics of using SSH, I made one a few years ago and it’s still pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FKsdbjzBcc
Chapters:
1:18 Invoking rsync
4:05 The --delete flag for rsync
5:30 Compression flag: -z
6:02 Using tmux and rsync together
6:30 but Veronica… why not use (insert shiny object here)
One trick that one of my students taught me a decade or so ago is to actually make an alias to list the useful flags.
Yes, a lot of us think we are smart and set up aliases/functions and have a huge list of them that we never remember or, even worse, ONLY remember. What I noticed her doing was having something like
goodman-rsyncthat would just echo out a list of the most useful flags and what they actually do.So nine times out of 10 I just want
rsync -azvh --progress ${SRC} ${DEST}but when I am doing something funky and am thinking “I vaguely recall how to do this”?dumbman rsyncand I get a quick cheat sheet of what flags I have found REALLY useful in the past or even just explaining whatazvhactually does without grepping past all the crap I don’t care about in the man page. And I just keep that in the repo of dotfiles I copy to machines I work on regularly.tldrandatuinhave been my main way of remembering complex but frequent flag combinationsYeah. There are a few useful websites I end up at that serve similar purposes.
My usual workflow is that I need to be able to work in an airgapped environment where it is a lot easier to get “my dotfiles” approved than to ask for utility packages like that. Especially since there will inevitably be some jackass who says “You don’t know how to work without google? What are we paying you for?” because they mostly do the same task every day of their life.
And I do find that writing the cheat sheet myself goes a long way towards me actually learning them so I don’t always need it. But I know that is very much how my brain works (I write probably hundreds of pages of notes a year… I look at maybe two pages a year).
Most Unix commands will show a short list of the most-helpful flags if you use
--helpor-h.