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When using rsync to copy files over the network, I give a path so that rsync will know where to put the file on the remote server.
rsync -av /home/ME/myfile user@remoteserver:/home/ME/
If I leave off the remote path, where will rsync put the file? Eg:
rsync -av /home/ME/myfile user@remoteserver
rsync -av /home/ME/myfile user@remoteserver
This command will not send the file to your remote server, it will just make a duplicate of the /home/me/myfile in your current working directory and the name of the file will be called user@remoteserver.
Just like when you want to create a backup of a file before editing it with cp, you do
cp -a /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.org
Your example of
rsync -av /home/ME/myfile user@remoteserver
has left off the colon. Without that, it assumes the file is local.
If you instead had
rsync -av /home/ME/myfile user@remoteserver:
Then it would make a remote copy. In this case the location is relative to the home directory of the user. With no relative path given, the file will appear in that directory.
$ rsync -v myfile user@remoteserver:
user@remoteservers's password:
myfile
sent 619 bytes received 35 bytes 145.33 bytes/sec
total size is 529 speedup is 0.81
$ ssh user@remoteserver "ls ./myfile"
user@remoteserver's password:
./myfile
