Failure to update differing file

[Wayne Davison]

On Sat, 4 May 2002, Michael Fischer wrote:
> 1.  If I touched only the corrupted file, so the file times differed,
>     then rsync did update the destination file.
> 
> 2.  If I used the --checksum flag, then it updated correctly.
> 
> But just a plain rsync failed to notice that the files were different.

Then it sounds like rsync was behaving exactly as it should.  By default
it just compares the file times and size and omits anything that appears
to be up-to-date by that standard.  The --checksum option tells it to go
a step farther and check if the checksums match before deciding if the
files are really the same (which is extremely slow and not usually
needed, so it's not on by default).  

..wayne..