rsync - Nov 2001 - Preserving symbolic links on the destination machine

Hi there,
   I'm trying to keep my laptop up-to-date with my desktop. For various 
reasons I have a number of directories which are soft-linked to 
directories on different machines on the network to which my desktop is 
connected. When I sync to my laptop with a command like

   rsync -vazu -e ssh ~/* --delete <destination> -L --copy-unsafe-links

it does what I want, which is to copy the symbolically linked 
directories on the desktop to actual directories on the laptop. However, 
when I copy them back to the desktop using just

   rsync -vazu,

rsync removes the symbolic link and creates a new subdirectory under the 
destination directory and puts the files there, rather than following 
the existing symbolic link. Is there some way to fix this,so that rsync 
will follow an existing symbolic link on the destination?
Thanks,
Duncan

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 12:08:35PM -0500, Duncan Galloway
wrote:
> Hi there,
>    I'm trying to keep my laptop up-to-date with my desktop. For various
> reasons I have a number of directories which are soft-linked to 
> directories on different machines on the network to which my desktop is 
> connected. When I sync to my laptop with a command like
> 
>    rsync -vazu -e ssh ~/* --delete <destination> -L
--copy-unsafe-links
> 
> it does what I want, which is to copy the symbolically linked 
> directories on the desktop to actual directories on the laptop. However, 
> when I copy them back to the desktop using just
> 
>    rsync -vazu,
> 
> rsync removes the symbolic link and creates a new subdirectory under the 
> destination directory and puts the files there, rather than following 
> the existing symbolic link. Is there some way to fix this,so that rsync 
> will follow an existing symbolic link on the destination?
> Thanks,
> Duncan
> 
Not that I can think of.  Can you just exclude those links with --exclude?

- Dave Dykstra