2014-07-27 Used rsync(1) more often lately. It's a wonderful tool, as I dis- cover. It's problem is that it has so many options and can do so many things, that you need to spend a lot of time in becoming familiar with it until you are able to use it for your everyday work. To cut it down: `rsync -rc SRC DEST' is (mainly) the incremental aquivilent to `cp -r SRC DEST'. You might want to add `-v' for verbosity. The common option `-a' tries to do verbatim copying, like for cp(1). In rsync(1) `-a' is a shortcut for `-rlptgoD'. You might want to consult the man page for each of the letters. Dealing with rsync this way: Tying out and reading the man page up and down helped me a lot. The real problem I hat to solve was this: I copied the contents of a dying USB disk a few weeks ago. Now, I was asked to copy them back on a new USB disk. It was all Windows data and a FAT formated disk. Thus, using `-a' printed lots of warnings and was never able to succeed because it couldn't set the same groups and permissions. Adding `--no-g --no-p' after the `-a' helped. As there were no links or special files in the data, I rather stuck with `-rcv' instead of `-av' and the `--no' flags. Still the copy failes. I'll defer the problem ... http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke