Why add a trailing slash after an rsync destination?

Question

According to this web page, adding '/' to the end of an rsync destination produces a different result from not adding it.

I've tried to test this, but I cannot verify it:

$ mkdir dir{1..3}
$ touch dir1/file
$ rsync -r dir1/ dir2
$ rsync -r dir1/ dir3/
$ ls dir*
dir1:
file

dir2:
file

dir3:
file

Does appending a '/' to the destination actually have a use sometimes?

Answer 1

It does make a difference when the source is a file and the destination directory does not exist. For instance take a file called file as source:

• $ rsync file dest/ will create a copy of file inside a directory dest, whereas
• $ rsync file dest will make a copy of the file file called dest

---

To add (from the comments); if a directory dest already exists, a copy file will be created in dest in both cases above.

Basic example:

~/test > touch file
~/test > mkdir dest1
mkdir: created directory 'dest1'
~/test > tree
.
├── dest1
└── file

1 directory, 1 file
~/test > rsync file dest1
~/test > rsync file dest2
~/test > rsync file dest3/
~/test > tree
.
├── dest1
│   └── file
├── dest2
├── dest3
│   └── file
└── file

2 directories, 4 files
~/test >