rsync mnemonic

rsync mnemonic

The choice seemed arbitrary to me until I came up with a mnemonic for it: Trailing slash means "the contents of the directory," and no trailing slash means "the directory as a single thing." Somehow my brain also maps that to pointers versus values:

rsync(src, dest);  /* one item, named 'src', will be created in dest */
rsync(*src, dest); /* everything under 'src' will be created in dest */