Number of Files Transferred Seems Wrong

[Matt McCutchen]

On Tue, 2007-11-27 at 10:11 -0400, Jon wrote:
> During testing, I completely removed everything from my testing dir
> and then ran an rsync into it from another directory on the same
> machine into this directory. When the transfer was complete, I had the
> entire /etc /var and /root dirs in my testing directory and the file
> space totalled a little over 1GB. The report generated by the --stats
> switch showed something like 35,000 files as the "Number of files" but
> only 2 were indicated as transferred under the "Number of files
> transferred" item of the same report.
> 
> I know this number is wrong as there was nothing in my testing dir and
> now there are the entire contents of the /etc, /var and /root dir, but
> I don't know why the Number of files transferred is incorrect.

That is very odd, but I can't do much to troubleshoot it from the
information you gave.  Please repeat this procedure but pass -vvii to
rsync to get more information, and post your command line and the
resulting log.

> Can someone shed some light for me on exactly how the 'Number of files
> transferred' number is arrived at? Perhaps it's not at cut and dried
> as I think.

It is the number of regular files in the file list whose data is
transferred from sender to receiver either in full or using the
delta-transfer algorithm.  Once rsync decides to transfer a file, the
transfer counts even if the data was already identical.  The statistic
includes exactly those files whose itemize codes begin with "<" or
">" (indicating a transfer) in the -i output.

Matt