Ignoring parts of stat(2)

[Tony Abernethy]

Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
> On 05.01.2010 05:36, grarpamp wrote:
> > >  That option can be easily missed it's: --size-only
> >
> > That seems like at least part of what would be useful :)
> > Certainly it covers the most common case of modtimes.
> >
> > However, it doesn't seem to work :(
> >
> > cp -p /etc/passwd a
> > cp -p /etc/passwd b
> >
> > ls -liT a b
> > 5 -rw-r--r--  1 user wheel  1706 Dec 25 03:08:02 2009 a
> > 6 -rw-r--r--  1 user wheel  1706 Dec 25 03:08:02 2009 b
> >
> > touch a
> >
> > ls -liT a b
> > 5 -rw-r--r--  1 user wheel  1706 Jan  5 05:24:17 2010 a
> > 6 -rw-r--r--  1 user wheel  1706 Dec 25 03:08:02 2009 b
> >
> > rsync -Haxi --delete --size-only ./a ./b
> > .f..t...... a
> >
> > ls -liT a b
> > 5 -rw-r--r--  1 user wheel  1706 Jan  5 05:24:17 2010 a
> > 6 -rw-r--r--  1 user wheel  1706 Jan  5 05:24:17 2010 b
> 
> rsync always updates the meta-data, even for files that it doesn't
> transfer.
> 
> See:
> chmod 777 a
> rsync -Haxi --delete --size-only ./a ./b
> 
> 
> AFAICT from the man-page there is nothing you can do about that without
> other drawbacks like don't synchronizing the mtime at all.
> (See the replacement-list of options for "-a" and skip "-t")
> 

You might get the desired effect with riciculously large values of 
--modify-window