How to rsync exclude a specific directory

Have you considered using find to do your hard work?

Something along the lines of

find ./ -name "*.html" -exec rsync -R {} /target/base/directory/ \; 

will recreate the directory tree of ./ in which html files are found, and build the same under /target/base/directory

In fact I've just tried this with latest cygwin rsync and you're right. Using exclude files it's not possible to exclude a folder with spaces in it's name. However it works to exclude its contents while the folder itself is still synchronized.

I've used the following for testing:

My\ Documents/*

Note the \ to escape the space. However the My Documents" folder is still created on target side but remains empty even if there is some content on source side.

I've found that (at least for Cygwin rsync) the --exclude= parameter works correctly even with spaces:

rsync [...] --exclude='My Documents'

Just excludes the complete folder.

So it looks like you've likely encountered a bug in rsync parsing on exclude files. But using the --exclude= parameter you can work around this issue - in worst case writing your own wrapper reading your exclude file and assigning an exclude parameter for each line.