3 ms·

> scp to copy files to another machine or server Shouldn't that be rsync? I was under the impression scp has been fully superseded by rsync. Secure, more eff

• tene 15y ago
  rsync has a few quirks. scp is more-convenient for many people because it shares almost identical options to cp. The most frequent cause of grief with rsync, in my experience, is presence or absence of a trailing / on the source argument. Many users aren't even aware of the difference in meaning, and even those that are aware still get it wrong sometimes, primarily due to tab-completion. I personally use rsync frequently, but for newer users I recommend scp, unless they're dealing with a very large volume of data where rsync would provide significant benefit.
• mattbriggs 15y ago
  when I want to grab the latest version of a 30gb database dump, I think rsync. When I want to grab a file off my desktop when I am in a meeting, I think scp
  • SkyMarshal 15y ago
    Interesting, why not rsync for the desktop file too?
    • mattbriggs 15y ago
      It's mostly inertia, I know the scp command way better then rsync, and for small things (which are the majority for me),it doesn't matter so much what I use. The other day, a coworker freaked when I searched for a file using find . | ack file,instead of just using find properly. I gave pretty much the same argument, so he measured it, and found I was losing about 0.002s. He basically said it was he principal of the thing, but for command line tools I really need a good reason to learn something new without any noticble benefit 99.9% of the time