CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellrsync
Nick Bull
Nick Bull

Reputation: 9876

Rsync ignores folders ending in slashes

I have this following content in a file named "/rsync/include.txt"

+ /home/**
+ /opt**
- *

I then call the rsync command as follows:

rsync -avr --include-from="/rsync/include.txt" . ../backup

This produces the following output:

sending incremental file list
created directory ../archive
./
opt/
opt/some-file
opt/include-me/
opt/include-me/me-too
opt/include-me/and-me/

sent 299 bytes  received 106 bytes  810.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00

The /home directory exists, and contains files.

Why does the + /home/** pattern not work? I do not want to use the + /home** pattern, as that could match other folder names, e.g., /homeopathy.

Can anybody help me understand why this command doesn't work, and point me in the direction of the working command?

EDIT: While I'd still like an answer to this question, I sincerely suggest using rdiff-backup as it uses similar filtering files and patterns, but is substantially easier to use. I've spent a good deal of time today on this issue with rsync, which was resolved in a few minutes using rdiff-backup.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 387

Answers (1)

rkta
rkta

Reputation: 4589

General debugging info

The easiest way to see if your filter rules do what you want, is to use -vv (increase verbosity twice) in combination with -n (dry-run).

With double verbosity you will see which pattern caused which file to be ignored. You may grep the output to only see the relevant parts.

Example

%  rsync -avv --include 'opt/1' --exclude 'opt/*' -n ./ /tmp  \
    | grep '\[sender\]'
[sender] showing directory opt/1 because of pattern opt/1
[sender] hiding directory opt/2 because of pattern opt/*
[sender] hiding directory opt/3 because of pattern opt/*

Specific answer

Your example fails because + /home/** is excluded by - *.

man rsync states:

Note that, when using the --recursive (-r) option (which is implied by -a), every subdir component of every path is visited left to right, with each directory having a chance for exclusion before its content.

So the pattern /home/** will be evaluated after /home is traversed, but this will never happen, because - * excludes /home.

To include /home/ you just have to insert it before /home/**, so your exclude file becomes:

+ /home/
+ /home/**
+ /opt/
+ /opt/**
- *

Upvotes: 1

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