Rsync – Sync Only Subdirectories and Content

directoryfilesrsync

I have a directory that contains a number of files and subdirectories. See below:

baseDir
  bad1
  bad2
  subDir1
    file1
  subDir2
    file1

I would like to rsync the contents of baseDir without rsyncing bad1 and bad2.

resulting in

targetDir
  SubDir1
    file1
  SubDir2
    file1

I don't care if it takes two commands but how do I do it?

Best Answer

You can either include the desired directories and their parent and exclude everything else, or exclude the bad directories. Note that order matters: rsync decides what to do with a file from the first matching pattern (so for example anything after --exclude=* is effectively ignored). Note also that excluding a directory prevents it not only from being copied but also from being traversed, so this effectively excludes everything below it. See this rsync filter primer for more information.

rsync --include='/' --include='/subDir***' --exclude='*' baseDir/ targetDir/
rsync --exclude='/bad*' baseDir/ targetDir/

Related Solutions

Inotify and rsync on large number of files

If the server has a slow processor avoid checksums and compression with rsync. I would remove ht "-z" option in the rsync command.

rsync --update -alvr --exclude '*cache*' --exclude '*.git*' /var/www/* root@secondwebserver:/var/www/

Note that it will not avoid rsync to compare the 650k files. You could rsync subdirectories of /var/www one by one to reduce the number of files checked at one time.

Get First File in Each Subdirectory Matching Extensions – Bash Guide

With zsh:

for d (subdir*(/)) mixb $d/*.(dat|d01)([1])

The bash equivalent would be something like:

shopt -s nullglob extglob
for d in subdir*/; do
  [ -L "${d%/}" ] && continue
  set -- "$d"*.@(dat|d01)
  [ "$#" -eq 0 ] || mixb "$1"
done

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Inotify and rsync on large number of files

Get First File in Each Subdirectory Matching Extensions – Bash Guide

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