pur‐
pose is to make it much easier to specify these two options for a
long transfer that may be interrupted.
There is also a --info=progress2 option that outputs statistics
based on the whole transfer, rather than individual files. Use
this flag without outputting a filename (e.g. avoid -v or specify
--info=name0) if you want to see how the transfer is doing with‐
out scrolling the screen with a lot of names. (You don’t need to
specify the --progress option in order to use --info=progress2.)
Finally, you can get an instant progress report by sending rsync
a signal of either SIGINFO or SIGVTALRM. On BSD systems, a SIG‐
INFO is generated by typing a Ctrl+T (Linux doesn’t currently
support a SIGINFO signal). When the client‐side process receives
one of those signals, it sets a flag to output a single progress
report which is output when the current file transfer finishes
(so it may take a little time if a big file is being handled when
the signal arrives). A filename is output (if needed) followed
by the --info=progress2 format of progress info. If you don’t
know which of the 3 rsync processes is the client process, it’s
OK to signal all of them (since the non‐client processes ignore
the signal).
CAUTION: sending SIGVTALRM to an older rsync (pre‐3.2.0) will
kill it.
--password‐file=FILE
This option allows you to provide a password for accessing an
rsync daemon via a file or via standard input if FILE is -. The
file should contain just the password on the first line (all
other lines are ignored). Rsync will exit with an error if FILE
is world readable or if a root‐run rsync command finds a non‐
root‐owned file.
This option does not supply a password to a remote shell trans‐
port such as ssh; to learn how to do that, consult the remote
shell’s documentation. When accessing an rsync daemon using a
remote shell as the transport, this option only comes into effect
after the remote shell finishes its authentication (i.e. if you
have also specified a password in the daemon’s config file).
--early‐input=FILE
This option allows rsync to send up to 5K of data to the "early
exec" script on its stdin. One possible use of this data is to
give the script a secret that can be used to mount an encrypted
filesystem (which you should unmount in the the "post‐xfer exec"
script).
The daemon must be at least version 3.2.1.
--list‐only
This option will cause the source files to be listed instead of
transferred. This option is inferred if there is a single source
arg and no destination specified, so its main uses are:
1. to turn a copy command that includes a destination arg
into a file‐listing command, or
2. to be able to specify more than one source arg. Note: be
sure to include the destination.
CAUTION: keep in mind that a source arg with a wild‐card is ex‐
panded by the shell into multiple args, so it is never safe to
try to specify a single wild‐card arg to try to infer this op‐
tion. A safe example is:
rsync ‐av ‐‐list‐only foo* dest/
This option always uses an output format that looks similar to
this:
drwxrwxr‐x 4,096 2022/09/30