Please read the rsync manual

Why should I bother doing that when 'perldoc perlhack' explicitly told me what I had to run ?

(Actually, the '.' you quoted from my post was just a "full stop" - not part of the command that I actually ran.) Needless to say, when I run the command exactly as you suggested it works fine :-) I can now see that the command I ran simply downloaded the list of files - but not the actual files, themselves. The (what-I-presume-to-be-successful) download terminates with:

.
.
x2p/util.c
x2p/util.h
x2p/walk.c
rsync: failed to set permissions on "/cygdrive/c/_32/rsync/.": Permiss
+ion denied
 (13)

sent 96831 bytes  received 17417748 bytes  48855.17 bytes/sec
total size is 64828778  speedup is 3.70
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at /home/la
+po/packaging/tmp/rsync-2.6.6/main.c(1173)
[download]

Not sure of the effect of that error message - I'll find out tomorrow when I try to build perl-5.11.0 (and Math-Pari, if perl-5.11.0 builds ok) - and I'll report back. It's now nearly 1.30am over here (and I was up at 3am yesterday morning) ... 7.5 hours of shit is enough for me for one night :-)

Thanks to ysth, BrowserUk and haoess.

Cheers,
Rob