rsync - Jun 2006 - Why does rsync -an show files that are the same?

When doing a dry-run with the -n option, man rsync says it will "show 
what would have happened".  I am using rsync -an.

Does this mean that rsync will _only_ show files that would have been 
transferred and not show files that are the same?

In testing this with two subdirectories with man files and sub-sub 
directories, rsync _seems_ to be showing all files instead of only the 
few that have recently changed.  The command I used was
rsync -uaHvn    --modify-window=4000  $1*  $2


For example, I did ls-l on the very first item in both directories and 
it was identical, yet appeared in the rsync output.

This is very confusing as I only want to see the few files that _would_ 
be transferred.  Am I doing something dumb?

Larry
-- 
Larry Alkoff N2LA - Austin TX
Using Thunderbird on Slackware Linux

On Sat, Jun 03, 2006 at 09:05:09PM -0500, Larry Alkoff
wrote:
> In testing this with two subdirectories with man files and sub-sub 
> directories, rsync _seems_ to be showing all files instead of only the 
> few that have recently changed.
I'd imagine that the reason for this is that rsync is going to copy the
files to a different directory than you're expecting.  For instance, if
you run your script like this:

    script dir/ /dest
    
the $1* turns into "dir/*", which copies the files from inside
"dir"
directly into "/dest" (use the --relative option if you want them to
go
into /dest/dir).

I'd suggest using -i (--itemize) along with -n (--dry-run) to see why
rsync thinks that each file needs to be transferred.  If you see a
string of plus signs, that means the file doesn't exist yet in the
destination.  Otherwise, you'll see which attributes are different
between the source and the destination (i.e. the timestamp or size
must differ for rsync to transfer the file).

..wayne..