How to change permissions on a directory without meaning to... - include/exclude semantics

[Tim Small]

Hi,

Think I've found either a documentation bug, in rsync (or possibly a 
code bug), with the include/exclude feature.  This occurs on (at least) 
2.5.5 and 2.5.6

First I created a file list of files that I wanted backed up


[root at poppy root]# cat /tmp/sendmail-rpmverify-out
/etc/
/etc/aliases
/etc/mail/
/etc/mail/helpfile
/etc/mail/local-host-names
/etc/mail/sendmail.mc
/etc/mail/statistics
/etc/mail/trusted-users
/etc/mail/virtusertable
/etc/sendmail.cf
/etc/sysconfig/sendmail

2. Then I fed this file to rsync as the files that it should copy from 
one path to another:

# rsync -av --include-from /tmp/sendmail-rpmverify-out --exclude '*' / /tmp/

3. Check file permissions on /tmp

[root at poppy root]# ls -ald /tmp/
drwxr-xr-x   36 root     root         4096 Oct  3 05:44 /tmp/

So, the --exclude '*'  doesn't actually exclude '/' from the list, so
the file permissions on / are copied over to /tmp

No files under /tmp, except those specified in the file touched tho'.

 From the rsync manual page:

"rsync builds an ordered list of include/exclude options as specified on 
the command line. When a filename is encountered, rsync checks the name 
against  each  exclude/include pattern in turn. The first matching 
pattern is acted on. If it is  an  exclude  pattern,  then  that file 
is skipped. If it is an include pattern then that filename is not 
skipped.  If no matching include/exclude pattern is found then  the
filename is not skipped."


I thought maybe I wasn't telling it explicitly enough not to include '/'
in its list, so I tried this:

rsync -av --include-from /tmp/sendmail-rpmverify-out --exclude '**'
/ /tmp/

and this:

rsync -av --include-from /tmp/sendmail-rpmverify-out --exclude '/**'
/ /tmp/

and even this:

rsync -av --include-from /tmp/sendmail-rpmverify-out --exclude '/**'
--exclude / / /tmp/

but it still does the same thing, and updates the permissions on /tmp -
thus it seems that the source path specified to rsync (in this case '/')
is always implicitly included, even though this isn't documented in the
man page.  If this is a feature, then I think it would be helpful to 
state it in the "include/exclude" part of the manual page..

Unfortunately, before I worked out what had happened, the mod-perl web 
server on this machine had got the load up to 40, and partially stopped 
working, as it was unable to create a temporary socket in /tmp/   :o(


Comments/thoughts?


Cheers,

Tim.