John Schmidt wrote:
If you put a trailing slash on the first directory, i.e. rsync -aPn directory/ machineB:~/directory you will get a new directory created on machineB, i.e. ~/directory/directory
No, it's the other way round. If you put a slash at the end of the source directory, it will *not* create a new subdirectory.
But that's just rsync. "cp -a" will copy the source directory as subdirectory into the target regardless whether the source path ends with a slash. So the only 'portable' method to specify source paths that are meant not to create a subdirectory in the target is my "slashdot" (directory/.) recommendation.
Christian.