Lab 10.2

The trailing dot in the rsync destionaton stops the automatic creation of output directories. This helps make the rsync  more specific as to where it will store files.  Consider: 

$ rm -fr /tmp/LFT*

$ rsync -avx  LFT  student@localhost:/tmp/LFT/ 

One would probably expect to see the output as  /tmp/LFT/<files>  

but the files will be in /tmp/LFT/LFT<files> 

Not what I had in mind.

If we use the trailing dot, which stops directory creation the top level directory we can see rsync is not creating the top level directory. 

$ rm  -fr /tmp/LFT

$ rsync   -avx FLT student@localhost:/tmp/LFT/.    #--> generates an error 

$ mkdir /tmp/LFT 

$ rsync -avx LFT student@localhost:/tmp/LFT/.    #--> the command works but still generates the extra directory

 Now by refining the input specification to copy only the files: 

$ rm -fr /tmp/LFT

$ mkdir /tmp/LFT 

$ rsync -avx LFT/. student@localhost:/tmp/LFT/. 

We get just the files from the original directory placed in the directory we created. This gives percise control where the files are placed.