Ask Gemini Pro 2.5 to build the rsync command and then give it the man page for your version of rsync. It should succeed the first time.
Here's a command to copy the man page to the clipboard than you can immediately paste into aistudio (on a Mac):
man rsync | col -b | pbcopy
As a general rule, if you would need to look something up to complete a task, the AI needs the same information you do—but it's your job to provide it.
So I paste the man page into llm and tell it to only give me parameters that are in that page? Even if it obeyed, it would still choke on how to exclude hidden MacOS kruft files from the copy...
No, you don't need to "tell it to only give me parameters that are in that page."
Here's the entire prompt:
I need the rsync command to copy local files from `/foo/bar` to `~/baz/qux` on my `user@example.com` server.
Exclude macOS cruft like `.DS_Store`, etc. Here's the man page:
<paste man page for your rsync that you copied earlier, see above>
Here's a command to copy the man page to the clipboard than you can immediately paste into aistudio (on a Mac):
As a general rule, if you would need to look something up to complete a task, the AI needs the same information you do—but it's your job to provide it.