Help with complicated heirarchy exclude syntax
reader at newsguy.com
reader at newsguy.com
Sat Dec 22 16:09:32 GMT 2007
I want rsync to do this:
Backup all files under ~/, except in some cases.
When rsync gets to ~/News, which has an extensive, fluctuating and
deep heirarchy of directories under it. An example might be:
News/agent/nntp/news.gmane.org/gmane/comp/lang/perl/beginners/
I want to skip any files that have all numbers for names which would
be under the last directory above. However there are at least 2 files
in there (.overview .agentview) that I do want rsync to get.
But when rsnyc gets to ~/Mail, which has a much shallower heirarchy
with files that have numbers for names, I want to backup all those and
anywhere else rsync finds files with numbers for names under ~/.
Its a tall order. I've been ducking it with various other schemes but
would really like to get something like that to work instead of
running several rsync backups schemes against ~/.
How can I tell rsync to go to the bottom of a heirarchy skipping any
files with numbers for names but retrieving .[oa]*view
Yet not skip files with numbers for names anywhere else.
Further, how would I define files with numbers for names?
*[0-9]
[0-9]*[0-9]
would be a couple of ways but even there one might get something like:
some7
9and5
Either of those definitions would actually be mostly ok since files
named as I've shown are very unlikely to occur there but still needing
a more precise way to define files like 1, 12, 123, 12345 etc with one
pattern comes up fairly often.
As I understand it, exclude files do not understand regular
expressions.
It appears rsync has complicated options in exclude and filter rules
that suggest I might sprinkle more exclude files throughout the
heirarchy.
That might work but I don't know what directories might be created
under that heirarchy and it changes fairly often so the .filter files
would need to be fairly shallow where things are permanent.
Further I didn't understand from the man page how the merge-dir and
filter files actually work or what they need to look like.
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