Maybe: run a command, see what it does to your files without actually doing it

Re:Maybe: run a command, see what it does to your files with... by GigabyteCoin on Sunday February 07, 2016 @12:44AM (#11051806)

I would have used something like this when I was first learning rsync...

Even though I had read all of the man pages and knew the commands inside and out, it still seemed incredibly risky and scary to me to run rsync with the --delete function when I was backing up my main USB drive for the very first time.

Basically my biggest fear was that I had source and destination mixed up, which I didn't, but it would have been nice to run a test trial of that command before doing so.

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Re:Maybe: run a command, see what it does to your files with... by P4bTXfOZAZicOOw on Sunday February 07, 2016 @12:47AM (#11051821)

From man rsync:

    -n, --dry-run               perform a trial run with no changes made

This probably also would have helped

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Re:Maybe: run a command, see what it does to your files with... by bentaber on Sunday February 07, 2016 @12:49AM (#11051826)

Wouldn't the rsync --dry-run flag be helpful in that scenario?

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Re:Maybe: run a command, see what it does to your files with... by SixSigma on Sunday February 07, 2016 @03:38AM (#11052197)

did cp not work on your system ?

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Re:Maybe: run a command, see what it does to your files with... by cyphar on Sunday February 07, 2016 @06:10AM (#11052517)

rsync has integrity checking and is better in quite a few ways.

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Re:Maybe: run a command, see what it does to your files with... by SixSigma on Sunday February 07, 2016 @08:56AM (#11052830)

i meant to backup up before running rsync

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