You really have to admire the way that a crucially important Linux utility like "rsync" manages to be inconsistent in the manner that it presents error messages, using both "cannot" and "could not", making grep usage twice as complex. Why does rsync do this? I have no idea -- I *couldn't* tell you.
@lauren And worse, even when you encounter grammatical inconsistency like this---the kind that was set an Apple UX engineer's hair on fire---you can't correct it because in general these tools never evolved a machine-readable data-channel separate from the human readable data-channel, so now if you change it you risk breaking somebody's regexes.
There's plenty to hate and love about Microsoft, but separating error codes from error messages was very smart.
