Do A Dry Run Of An rsync

The rsync command, especially when running recursively (with the -a flag), will create and update a bunch of directories and files. Because of that, you may want to do a dry run of an rsync command to make sure it is touching the intended files.

The --dry-run flag (or the -n flag for short) will prepare a synchronization of one directory to another. You can use this flag to be sure that the source and target files and directories are correct.

The -n (or --dry-run) flag on its own won't show what is going to get synced. To get that information, you need to combine it with the -v (verbose) flag.

$ rsync -anv til-temp/ til-content

building file list ... done
./
LICENSE
...

sent 909 bytes  received 296 bytes  2410.00 bytes/sec
total size is 1058  speedup is 0.88

That will show everything that is going to be synced from til-temp/ recursively to til-content.

Doing a dry run is a great way to make sure you have the patterns for --exclude flags correct, before actually syncing anything.

$ rsync -anv --exclude='./*.md' --exclude='.*' til-temp/ til-content

That excludes top-level markdown files and all dotfiles and dot-directories.

source