Why does this rsync line not work?

[Larry Alkoff]

I'm trying to update a bunch of downloaded files from a mounted older disk.

This command works from the Kterm command line or in a script:
rsync -nuv     /mnt/kinda2/home/lba/dl/*   /home/lba/dl
and a list of the files to be updated appears on the screen.

But this line (without a tailing * in source) does not work:
rsync -nuv     /mnt/kinda2/home/lba/dl/   /home/lba/dl

and I get the following error message:
skipping directory /mnt/kinda2/home/lba/dl/.
sent 21 bytes  received 20 bytes  82.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00

The man pages says that a trailing / on the source will cause rsync to 
copy the _contents_ of the destination directory.  I do that in the 
second case but it does not work.

Without the trailing / on source, rsync would mkdir the target directory 
and copy the files which is not what I want.

I suppose I've misunderstood the man page but could someone set me straight?


Larry

-- 
Larry Alkoff N2LA - Austin TX
Using Thunderbird on Linux