Since I lately had to do a lot of data-migrating stuff, I made myself an alias for rsync and I use it as recursivecopy-command. Works great! Write this down… 
Alias
# alias rcp='rsync --owner --group --perms --times --archive --recursive --progress'
Some advantages
- No worries about accidentally overwriting important files
- No struggle with long syntaxis anymore
- Same syntaxformat as cp
Example:# rcp -v /home/user1/* /home/user2/* - Progress indicator
- Retaining file permissions and ownerships
- Very forgiving with interruptions!
You can hit CTRL-C without any risk. Just restart your rcp-action. And it will continue where it left of…
And sure you can add this alias to the bashrc, the .bash_profile, and so on….
useful! when i wanted to copy all the files including hidden files, i found cp -r was not good at doing that, then i heard the rsync, it’s a good tool.