rsync complains about file arguments not existing. For example, running this command to archive a selected set of files: rsync -aq --remove-from-source --remove-source-files /var/log/messages*bz2 /backup/maillog*bz2 /backup/auth.log*bz2 backupserver::myname/ will issue the following errors if any of the given patters has no match: rsync: link_stat "/var/log/messages*bz2" failed: No such file or directory (2) rsync: link_stat "/backups/maillog*bz2" failed: No such file or directory (2) ... One particular application of commands similar to this is to periodically save archives to a central backup server via cron. This causes cron to periodically mail admins with the above errors. The option to divert this to /dev/null is dangerous, as it would lose other error messages which ARE actually useful, such as failures to reach the backup server. A command line argument such as --ignore-missing-files that avods this type of errors (link_stat) would do great.
I see that the newest version of rsync does support this as "--ignore-missing-args" . The manpage on the Mac tricked me to assume otherwise. Closing this, sorry for the noise.