mkstemp fails but data still transferred

[John Van Essen]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005, Steve Harris <sharris at myra.com> wrote:
> 
> What seems to be happening is that even though the directory doesn't exist
> and the temporary file can't be created the data is transferred but
> not written anywhere
....
> I guess what I'm getting at is that if rsync can't create the temporary
> file shouldn't it just bail ?

The Documentation section of the rsync web site has a "How Rsync Works" page:

  http://rsync.samba.org/how-rsync-works.html

originally written by the late JW Schultz.

In the pipeline section you'll see that communication is unidirectional.
One of rsync's many advantages is streaming unidirectional pipelines.
Not having two-way chatter helps speed up file transfers.

Since it is optimized for the normal case where there are no problems
on the receiving end, the receiver has no way to tell the sender to
stop sending file content when there is a problem, and must accept and
discard the remainder of the file (which is what you are seeing).
Subsequent file transfers might be successful, so it can't abort, yet.

Hope that helps.
-- 
        John Van Essen  Univ of Minn. Alumnus  <vanes002 at umn.edu>