Is this a bug by any chance?

[Wayne Davison]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 11:19:16PM -0800, George R Goffe wrote:
> Rsync went to all the trouble of figguring out which files needed to
> be copied and then blew up when it actually went looking for a target
> and found none.

I'm guessing that you had more than one source file specified, otherwise
rsync would have died immediately with a syntax error on a local copy.
It is true that, in the case where the last arg is either invalid or
references a file in a transfer of more than one file, rsync will die
after the full file-list transfer occurs.  The reason for this is that
rsync doesn't know for sure what types of destination arg are valid
until after it knows if the file-list contains one file or more than
one, so it currently waits to deal with the destination arg until after
the whole file-list is transferred.

I'm already looking into making this process happen sooner, and indeed,
into even making the whole transfer start more quickly.  Such changes
will not make it into the next release, though, which I'm hoping to
finish up sometime this month.

..wayne..