As a longtime macOS user I have used the built-in/bundled rsync binary that has been stuck at version 2.6.9 for various licensing reasons.

I recently decided to start using modern rsync via Homebrew. Everything is working fine, but one thing i cannot figure out is how to have verbose output during the sync, but have the saved log only show the updated/changed files.

This was default behavior with rsync 2.6.9 and I cannot figure how to do the same thing in rsync 3.x. here is an example:

rsync -avv --progress --stats --log-file=rsync.log /source/ /dest/

In rsync 2.6.9, due the double vv, the STDOUT during the sync is verbose, and shows everything, but the rsync.log file only shows which files were updated/changed/deleted. But I cannot figure out how to achieve the same thing in rsync 3.2.3.

I have looked extensively at the man pages but it’s not clear to me how to change this. I see a lot of posts about using the --itemize-changes switch, but this seems to affect both the STDOUT and the log.

I also see the --log-file-format switch, but that seems to only affect the format of each line of the log, not what is actually spit out.

So what I am essentially trying to do is see verbose STDOUT but then suppress of all of the uptodate messages in the log. Can this be done in modern 3.x rsync?

Sorted by: Reset to default

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