quoted

Its not clear to me where the rename operation happens in all of
this - does rsync create a local, temporary copy of the file and
then rename it?

Yes, this is normally how rsync does it.

If file already exists {
    foreach block {
        copy block either from disk or from the 
        source operand, whichever is never, to temp file
    }
}

When rsync catches a signal {
    move the tempfile to the original name
}





Jan Engelhardt
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