Include Exclude .. a canonical way

[Harry Putnam]

Wayne Davison <wayned at samba.org> writes:

> On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 05:14:29AM -0600, Harry Putnam wrote:
>> Still it seems there would be a more succinct way...
>
> There is if you use rsync 2.6.7 (currently in release testing):
>
>     rsync -avO --prune-empty-dirs --include=bookmarks.xml 
> 	      --filter='-! */' ~/.kde* some:dest/
>
> This tells rsync to descend through all the ~/.kde* directories that
> exist on the sender side and look for one or more bookmarks.xml files.
> The --prune-empty-dirs option is new, and ensures that you only create
> the directories necessary to hold the bookmarks.xml files.  Notes: the
> filter option means "exclude everything that is not a directory", and
> the -O option avoids changing the modify-time on the directories.

Nice .. since I am testing 6.7.  I just built it yesterday and
installed in a test --prefix..

The code I posted did already create only those dirs necessary to
house bookmarks.xml but it took a lot more dinking around to find the
right directories to include and so forth.  This looks  less
cumbersome and time consuming.  It will require close attention to the
man page and experimentation though.  And I'll have to move the test
install into production.

For me production is not too serious though... just a home boy single
user with lots of data.

That seems to be the big problem for me.  I don't look at rsync for
long periods and then when the time comes to finally get into it, I've
forgotten all I ever picked up and end up back here flumoxed by the
ins and outs of include/exclude.

I think I'm probably being too picky about what gets backedup and
should probably just accept the room use hit and and get disked up
until I'm ahead of the 8 ball.  If one just backs up by directory
ignoring what may be in it, all of a sudden the rules get real
easy.. that is, there are none....