I recently needed to move a few directorys of tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of files to my Synology. Perfect use for rsync!
Unfortunately, rsync on OS X is stuck at 2.6.9, and I wanted to take advantage of some of the new features of 3.1.0. Specifically better handling of OS X metadata, and progress indication.
Fortunately, this walks you through a quick build and installation of rsync 3.1.0 in your /usr/local/bin folder. The benefit is that you can install your new version alongside the OS X included version (which is installed in /usr/bin/). Then you can add a couple aliases to your .bash_profile to treat them appropriately.
My aliases are as follows:
alias oldrsync="/usr/bin/rsync"
alias rsync="/usr/local/bin/rsync"
alias nrsync="/usr/local/bin/rsync -a --info=progress2"The first makes the system-installed 2.6.9 version refrencable by using the command oldrsync. The second makes the version in /usr/local/bin/ (which is 3.1.0, in my case) the one that runs when I type rsync. Finally, the third references the new version of rsync with a couple flags I almost always use.