Rsync exclude wildcard files from the filter file

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.

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.