rsync - May 2009 - --relative, --dirs and --delete without --recursive

The manual says that without --recursive directories are (noisily)
skiped. However with --relative intermediate directories are created.
So what happens if you give only -R? Is -d the default? And what
happens when you give -R --no-dirs? I tried and it seems that
intermediate dirs are considered anyway, so it looks like -R overrides
--no-dirs. Is it true? Does it depend on the order of options?

On a related matter, I'm not clear on the behavior of --delete with -d
but without -r. The manual says "deletions will also occur when --dirs
(-d) is enabled, but only for directories whose contents are being
copied." However without -r the contents are not copied, only the
directories themselves, right? That seems to be the difference between
-r and -d. I'd expect this means deletion won't happen, and in some
tests files were in fact not removed. Therefore where does the change
in 2.6.7 mentioned in the manual has an effect?

On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 16:16 -0300, Carlos Carvalho wrote:
> The manual says that without --recursive directories are (noisily)
> skiped. However with --relative intermediate directories are created.
> So what happens if you give only -R? Is -d the default? And what
> happens when you give -R --no-dirs? I tried and it seems that
> intermediate dirs are considered anyway, so it looks like -R overrides
> --no-dirs. Is it true? Does it depend on the order of options?
With -R, the "intermediate" dirs (standard term is implied dirs) are a
special case.  All other directories are governed by -d/-r.
> On a related matter, I'm not clear on the behavior of --delete with -d
> but without -r. The manual says "deletions will also occur when --dirs
> (-d) is enabled, but only for directories whose contents are being
> copied." However without -r the contents are not copied, only the
> directories themselves, right?
That is the case for source directories specified without a trailing
slash.  If a directory is specified with a trailing slash, rsync copies
its immediate contents (including immediate subdirectories but not
anything inside them) and deletes extraneous files from the
corresponding directory in the destination.

-- 
Matt