I am new to rsync and I do not understand the output I am getting, can someone help me out,
the output contains lines such as,
<f.st...... somefile.txt
<f+++++++++ someOtherfile.zip
.d..t...... someDir/
I do not understand what the options on the left mean, and I am having trouble finding the answer on google. Thanks.
The version of rsync I have installed on my system does not give that kind of output (perhaps you can clarify the options you use?), but rsync tries to reduce the amount of data sent over the network by scanning the remote and local file for identical 'blocks' of data. That way, only the parts of the file that are actually different have to be sent over the line.
I think it's very likely that those characters you see in the left hand column are indicators for the block matching process. + may mean 'identical' (or ., I suppose), d, s and t may indicate blocks 'shifted' in offset.
There is a good explanation in the man page, under itemize-changes:
http://www.samba.org/ftp/rsync/rsync.html
(Between mirrored archives of mailings lists and (perhaps out of date) copies of the documentation, it can be difficult to arrive at that page)