What happens after --max-delete is reached? Are updates processed?

[Voelker, Bernhard]

Sebastian Arcus wrote (Wednesday, October 31, 2012 12:18 PM):

> Reading the manual page: "This tells rsync not to delete more than NUM 
> files or directories." Also, according to docs, rsync exits with code 25 
> if max-delete has been reached. Now, rsync starts with the deletes by 
> default, and then it does updates.
>
> My question is, if --max-delete has been reached, does rsync still 
> proceed with the updates (not the deletes), or just exists immediately 
> with code 25 without doing any updates? The man page doesn't specify 
> either way, and looking at online posts, it would seem to suggest it 
> exits as soon as max-delete has been reached.

>From trying, I'd say it continues with updating
(for whatever case that would make sense ...):

  $ mkdir a b
  $ touch a/a b/b

  $ rsync -aix --delete --max-delete=0 a/. b/.
  >f+++++++++ a
  Deletions stopped due to --max-delete limit (1 skipped)
  rsync error: the --max-delete limit stopped deletions (code 25) at main.c(1052) [sender=3.0.9]

  $ echo $?
  25

  $ ls b/*
  b/a  b/b

Have a nice day,
Berny