Alternate cp and mv commands using rsync

Sometime you need to copy or move files, but preserve their ownership, timestamp or simply want to update the changing bits instead of blindly moving whole chunks of data.

I have two simple aliases to do just that. Meet rcp and rmv :

function rcp() { rsync -rahP --modify-window=1 "$@" }
function rmv() { rsync -rahP --modify-window=1 --prune-empty-dirs --remove-sent-files "$@" }
compdef _cp rcp rmv 

They are defined as functions and not aliases so I can define which completion functions zsh will use (that's the compdef part). In that case, I want them to use the same completion as for the basic cp command.

Tags : #linux, #zsh, #cp, #mv, #rsync, #compdef, #completion

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