Details of local copy

[Ronald J Kimball]

I see in the manpage that if rsync is used to copy files locally, "it
behaves like an improved copy command".  I was hoping for more details on
what that means.

Here's the specific situation I'm wondering about.  I have some files that
are stored in two different locations on the same server.  I could rsync
the files from the remote server twice, first to one location and then to
the other.  Or, I could rsync the files once to one location, and then copy
them to the other location.  (The first solution is simpler, but probably
less efficient.)

If I use rsync locally to copy the files from one location to another, and
the files already exist in the second location, does rsync still compare
the existing files to determine whether it needs to update the destination
file, and does it still copy to a temporary file before replacing the
destination file?

thanks!
Ronald