Ssh – How to write an rsync exclude for a directory tree with names containing spaces

excludemac-osxrsyncssh

I'm trying to exclude a directory tree as part of an rsync command embedded in a bash script approximately like this:

$OPTIONS="-rl --exclude 'Some Parent Directory/Another Directory'"

rsync $OPTIONS $SOURCEDIR a@b.com:/SomeTargetDir

My aim is to sync all of $SOURCEDIR into /SomeTargetDir on the target machine, with the exception of everything under Some Parent Directory/Another Directory. However, I keep seeing errors of this form:

rsync: link_stat "/Users/myusername/Parent\" failed: No such file or directory (2)

I assume this is related to escaping the exclude path, but I just can't seem to get it right: every combination of \\, \ and so on that I try doesn't seem right. How can I write the exclude rule correctly?

I don't want to use --exclude-from unless I absolutely have to.

I am using rsync version 3.0.9 on OS X 10.8, syncing to Ubuntu 12.04 over SSH.

Best Answer

Exclude matches patterns too. So try it like this:

$OPTIONS="-rl --exclude '*/Another Directory'"
rsync $OPTIONS $SOURCEDIR a@b.com:/SomeTargetDir

See this tutorial for more details.

EDIT #1

Another suggestion would be to try escaping double quotes rather than use single quotes:

$OPTIONS="-rl --exclude \"Some Parent\ Directory/Another\ Directory\""

The OP tried this alternative but it still didn't work for him in his case. It does work for me on Linux using version "3.0.8 protocol version 30" of rsync.

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