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Maybe I'm missing something in man rsync. What does a trailing slash on the destination do?

rsync -av source destination
rsync -av source destination/

Looks like those two do the same thing; same with:

rsync -av source/ destination
rsync -av source/ destination/

I don't know if the trailing slash for the destination matters, I know the one for the source is important, otherwise rsync creates a subfolder in the destinatiion folder with the source folder name

Yep, that's how I'm reading it. Looking through man rsync, some of the examples show a slash trailing the destination and some don't. That's a long document; I couldn't find an explanation for the trailing slash on the destination, but you'd think there's a reason for it.

the slash in the second example should cause source to be copied INTO the destination directory. if source is a directory, then source would be recreated under destination.



the first example should copy all the files in source to destination, but i believe it will not recreate the source directory

I think GoManutd hit on it. In my test, the trailing slash on the destination made a difference only if source was a file. If source was a directory, the slash trailing the destination didn't do anything -- the slash trailing the source controlled what happened.