I've alluded to rsync's usefulness for copying large bodies of data, such as software archives and CVS trees, but all my examples in this chapter show single files being copied. This is because my main priority is showing how to configure and use rsync securely.
I leave it to you to explore the many client-side (command-line) options rsync supports, as fully documented in the rsync(8) man page. Particularly noteworthy are -a (or --archive), which is actually shorthand for -rlptgoD and specifies recursion of most file types (including devices and symbolic links), and -C (or --cvs-exclude), which tells rsync to use CVS-style file-exclusion criteria in deciding which files not to copy.
