Rsync and include / exclude. How hard can it be

copyrsync

I'm trying to recursively copy a directory / file structure from one directory to another, keeping only html files. Should be a simple case of include / exclude shouldn't it?

I just want to print out the files first. When I get that right, I'll copy them.

rsync -a --list-only -v SOURCEDIR --exclude='.*' --include='**/*.html'

Gives me all the files.

rsync -a --list-only -v SOURCEDIR --include='**/*.html' --exclude='*'

and

rsync -a --list-only -v SOURCEDIR --include='*.html' --exclude='*' 
rsync -a --list-only -v SOURCEDIR --include=*.html --exclude=*

Give me no files.

rsync -a --list-only -v SOURCEDIR --include='*.html' --exclude='*.*'

Looks like it gives me the whole directory structure and only html files. But I don't want empty directories.

Help!

On Mac OS 10.6

Best Answer

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

Related Solutions

Rsync –files-from equivalent

I suspect that xargs is your friend in this instance.

Completely untested:

 # cat file | xargs -IREPLACE rsync -v REPLACE server:/path

xargs will take data from stdin and add it to the commandline one parameter per input line until it fills the command line length, and then runs a separate command until all the input lines have been used up. This will mean that rsync could well run more than once. This shouldn't be a problem in this case, but could be with other commands.

Usually xargs just sticks the arguments on the end of the line, but with rsync you'd want to have the destination last, so we use the -I option to replace a string with the arguments. (This is the bit that's untested). I'm also a little unsure what rsync will do with the paths, so please test this carefully before using it in anger.

If you do have a problem with xargs, you could use something like:

for i in $(cat file); do rsync -v $i server:/path; done

If your file is larger, you probably want to use a while/read loop instead. This will be much slower as it will do a single file at a time.

Linux – How to copy file preserving directory path in Linux

The switch you need is --parents, e.g.:

jim@prometheus:~$ cp --parents test/1/.moo test2/
jim@prometheus:~$ ls -la test2/
total 42
drwxr-xr-x   3 jim jim    72 2010-09-14 09:32 .
drwxr-xr-x 356 jim jim 43136 2010-09-14 09:32 ..
drwxr-xr-x   3 jim jim    72 2010-09-14 09:32 test
jim@prometheus:~$ ls -la test2/test/1/.moo
-rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 0 2010-09-14 09:32 test2/test/1/.moo

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Rsync –files-from equivalent

Linux – How to copy file preserving directory path in Linux

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