At the moment I might run two rsync commands: % rsync file1 remotehost:/a/ % rsync file2 file3 remotehost:/b/ This means making two connections to remotehost. If I wanted to copy all the files to the same directory on remotehost then of course I'd write a single rsync command, and this would be faster. But if they are going to different directories then I must invoke rsync twice, even though it's the same destination host. It would be nice (especially when copying to remote sites with high network latency) to have a single rsync command do multiple copies, even if you don't want a single destination directory on the remote host. I would suggest some syntax like % rsync --to remotehost:/a/ file1 --to remotehost:/b/ file2 file3 rsync would connect once to remotehost and then transfer file1, file2 and file3 to the appropriate places. I have seen feature requests to make rsync copy the same file to several different hosts, and I've looked at batch mode in the documentation, but I think this feature request is different.
You can do this using --relative and a little trickery: cd /emptydir ln -s /srcdir a ln -s /srcdir b rsync -avR --no-implied-dirs a/file1 b/file2 b/file3 remotehost:/ That may not be as convenient as supporting multiple destinations, but it does have the benefit of working right now. I don't think that the change you suggested is likely to ever happen.