Rsync specific directories

What you proposed should actually work:

rsync -rzvvhP remotehost:/home/tmp/1\* /home/tmp/

(You can get away with not quoting the * in most circumstances, as the pattern remotehost:/home/tmp/1\* is unlikely to match any file so it will be left alone with most shell setups.)

Your attempt with --exclude='*' failed because the first match applies, and your first match for everything (*) says to exclude.

See this guide for some general principles about rsync filters. Here, to include only directories beginning with 1 at the toplevel, and copy everything in included subdirectories, include /1 then exclude /*.

rsync -rzvvhP --include='/1' --exclude='/*' remotehost:/home/tmp/ /home/tmp/

venv/ needs to be excluded before */ is included:

rsync -avz --exclude='venv/' --include='*/' --include='*.py' --exclude='*' /tmp/src/ /tmp/dest/

The subtlety is that rsync processes rules in order and the first matching rule wins. So, if --include='*/' is before --exclude='venv/', then the directory venv/ is included by --include='*/' and the exclude rule is never consulted.

Could we simplify this?

Why do we need --include='*/' and --exclude='*'? Why isn't --exclude=venv/ --include='*.py' sufficient?

The default is to include files/directories. So, consider:

rsync -avz --exclude='venv/' --include='*.py' source target

This would include everything except files or directories under venv/. You, however, only want .py files. That means that we have to explicitly exclude other files with --exclude='*'.

--exclude='*' excludes both files and directories. So, if we specify --exclude='*', then all directories would be excluded and only the .py files it the root directory would be found. .py files in subdirectories would never be found because rsync does not look into directories that are excluded. Thus, if we have --exclude='*', we need to precede it with --include='*/' to ensure that the contents of all directories are explored.