Unexpected rsync behavior with --relative and symlink destinations

[Christopher Schanzle]

Hello, all. Sorry if this topic has been hashed out before -- I didn't see it searching the archives of this list.

I want to mirror a local system's /apps and /usr/local directories (both are real directories, not symlinks) to a remote system where /apps and /usr/local are symlinks to /local/apps and /local/usrlocal, respectively. The target directories exist on the remote system. I would have thought the following would do it:

rsync -n -e ssh -av --relative /apps /usr/local /home dest:

shows me the expected files to update. Removing the -n results in all the files being copied, with the first file being listed as "apps/" followed by filenames that shouldn't need to be copied and were not listed with the above "rsync -n ..." On the destination side, /apps is no longer a symlink and is replaced with a real directory. All files are resent/copied to this new directory. I tried these too:

rsync -av -e ssh --relative /apps/. /usr/local/. dest:
rsync -av -e ssh --relative /apps/* /usr/local/* dest:
rsync -av -e ssh --relative /apps/*/ /usr/local/*/ dest:

In each case, the symlink on dest:/apps was replaced with a directory.

I realize I can work around this via separate commands, which works fine:

rsync -av -e ssh /apps/ dest:/apps
rsync -av -e ssh /usr/local/ dest:/usr/local

Is this the expected behavior of --relative? If so, could the documentation be clarified?

More specifically, if dest:/apps/apache-1.3.26/ exists and is up to date (again, where dest:/apps is a symlink):

# rsync -n -av -e ssh --relative /apps/apache-1.3.26/ dest:
building file list ... done
wrote 177990 bytes read 20 bytes 39557.78 bytes/sec
total size is 256768589 speedup is 1442.44
# rsync -av -e ssh --relative /apps/apache-1.3.26/ dest:
building file list ... done
apps/
apps/apache-1.3.26/
/apps/apache-1.3.26/Makefile
/apps/apache-1.3.26/Makefile.tmpl
/apps/apache-1.3.26/apache_1.3.26.tar
^Crsync error: received SIGUSR1 or SIGINT (code 20) at rsync.c(229)

I wouldn't expect (1) rsync would change touch dest:/apps at all, (2) differ so drastically in the output of "-n" and not, and (3) to replace dest:/apps symlink with a new directory.

Both hosts are SPARC Solaris 2.8 systems using UFS filesystems.

TIA,
Chris


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