Question about the --backup option;

Matt McCutchen matt at mattmccutchen.net
Mon Mar 16 18:16:05 GMT 2009


On Mon, 2009-03-16 at 09:55 -0600, Paul E Condon wrote:
> The --backup option in GNU mv, and GNU cp extend the behavior of the
> -b option in a significant way, I believe. "--backup" allows
> specification of versioned backups, especially numbered backups, e.g.
> The old version of file, foo, becomes foo.~N~, where N is a decimal
> number. There is no mention of such a feature, that I can find, in
> info rsync, or man rsync.  Is this feature available in rsync? If so,
> is it available under another name?
> 
> Actually, the feature may be available under "-b", in mv and cp.
> The man page seems to indicate otherwise, so I've never tested it.
> I've just used "--backup=t", and loved it. Now how do I get similar
> behavior from rsync?

Rsync does not support numbered backups, but you could specify a
different backup suffix on each rsync run via --suffix.

-- 
Matt



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