UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I was reading the man page for rsync expecting it to talk about synchronization. It says it is like a rcp. I was expecting it to have something to do with synchronization.

I was expecting rsync to only copy those files that are newer and it does not look like this is what it was designed to do. I'm feeling confused. Why is it called rsync?

Is unison the program I want?

I've been reading the man page for unison too and I'm wondering why the cygwin installation program gave me the option to install multiple versions of unison instead of only the latest version. I see unision2.10.2, unision 2.12.0, unision 2.13 and unision 2.17. Do I care about the older versions?

How do I invoke the GUI interface for unison? I'm running cygwin on Win2K3 server. It says to double click on the icon but I cannot find the icon except thru windows explorer and that does not know about the cygwin dll. (hmmm... I think I'll post this question in the cygwin mailing list since it might be cygwin specific).

Thanks,
Siegfried

I'm assuming you're on Linux/cygwin. rsync (samba.org) does in fact do differences on files and update only those files which show differences.

We run rsync from a simple script from cron to keep remote file servers up to date.
We're running it under cygwin on Windows boxes.

Oh dear... I wonder if there is something wrong with my cygwin man pages.

Well how do I decide which to use: cygwin or unison?

Thanks,
Siegfried

You may have picked up an interesting variant of rsync... I don't know.

I don't know what to tell you.

OK. My fault. I finally found it by searching for synchonize. There is an example in my man page. It sure is brief.

Apparently the rsync program does not synchronize unless you use the update switch. Is it just me or is this counterintuitive? I would expect a program with a name like rsync to synchronize by default.

So what is the difference between using unison and rsync -u?

Thanks,
Siegfried