Newbie syntax question on --include-from option

[Wayne Davison]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 07:54:39PM +0000, Loris Serena wrote:
> rsync -azv -e ssh --stats --include-from=rsynclist.txt host-one:
> 
> and rsynclist.txt looks like
> + /export/home/user1/dir1/dir2/dir3/
> + /export/home/user1/dir2/dir3/dir4/
> + /export/home/user1/dir3/dir4/dir5/
> + /export/home/user1/dir4/dir5/dir6/
> + /export/home/user1/dir5/dir6/dir7/

If your list is small, remove the leading "+ " characters and do a
copy using the --relative option, command-line args, and a destination
path of "/".  For instance (note that -R is the same as --relative):

rsync -azvR -e ssh --stats `cat rsynclist.txt` host-one:/

The -R option tells rsync that you want all of the path from the source
arg to be included in each destination name (stripping only a common
prefix between the two paths).

If your list is too large for the command-line, you want --files-from.
There's a patch you can apply to rsync's latest release here:

    http://www.clari.net/~wayne/rsync-files-from.patch

This would let you specify the following command:

rsync -azv -e ssh --stats --files-from=rsynclist.txt / host-one:/

Since you're pushing info, only the local rsync needs to be patched with
files-from.  (If you were pulling, both sides would need to be patched.)

..wayne..