CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxunixrsync
CentAu
CentAu

Reputation: 11160

Rsync, include only certain files types excluding some directories

I want to rsync only certain file types (e.g. .py) and I want to exclude some directories (e.g. venv).

This is what I have tried:

rsync -avz --include='*/' --exclude='venv/' --include='*.py' --exclude='*' /tmp/src/ /tmp/dest/

But it doesn't work.

What am I missing?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3665

Answers (1)

David C. Rankin
David C. Rankin

Reputation: 84551

With rsync you do not need to use --include="*.py" to include '*.py' files in the copy. The --include option will only include files that have been excluded by --exclude= before. rsync specifies ** as the wildcard specifier. For example, if you want to copy all .py files in the current directory (and subdirectories), but not copy anything from the venc directory, you can do something similar to:

rsync -uav --exclude="venc" **.py destination

(note -a implies -rlptgoD)

which would recursively copy all .py files in present working directory to destination excluding the venc directory.

To recursively copy only *.py files from all directories below the current path excluding any venc directories, you can build a temporary file with the results of find containing the *.py files and exclude files containing venc/ as part of the path, and then transfer all filenames in the temporary file using the --files-from and --no-R (no relative) options to rsync as:

$ find /path/to -type f -name "*.py" | grep -v 'venc/' > tmpfile \
rsync -uav --no-R --files-from=tmpfile / host:/dest/dir \
rm tmpfile

This will capture all *.py files in any subdirectories excluding all directories including the name venc/ and anything below them. The --no-R option is needed to prevent the absolute filenames in tmpfile from be taken as relative to the current working directory.

Upvotes: 1

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