rsync'ing files between two remote servers, get errors stating rsync command not found on remote server

Question

Heyas

I'm trying to rsync files between two servers with

rsync -avlzp /source user@server:/destination

but instead I get errors stating

bash: rsync: command not found
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(635) [sender=3.0.2]

but rsync is installed on both servers. What am I doing wrong? I've also tried

rsync -av -e "ssh -l ssh-user" /source server:/destination

with the same result.

I'm mainly trying to use rsync so that it only copies over differences if they exist...

Thanks

Answer 1

rsync may be in the path on the remote machine when running an interactive shell, but not when running rsync by ssh (with a non-interactive shell). .bashrc is normally only run for interactive shells, for example, so if your path is defined there, it will not be parsed when running rsync --server on the remote end. Try /etc/profile. See bash(1) for more details.

You can use --rsync-path to specify the path to the rsync binary on the remote machine.