Copying many sources to different places inside a destination

[Wayne Davison]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 06:33:44PM -0500, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> But the parts of the destination paths following ~/www are not always
> suffixes of the source paths, so --relative with dot-dirs is not good
> enough.

While rsync doesn't currently support this, but you might be able to
accomplish what you want by using some creative symlinks on the
destination side and --keep-dirlinks.  For instance:

mkdir /some/rsync-dest
cd /some/rsync-dest
ln -s ~/www main-web-content
ln -s ~/www/logicdes logicdes
ln -s ~/www/bigint-svn svn-repo
ln -s ~/www/math vectors
ln -s ~/www/mirror/bin mirror-latest

cd ~
rsync -avRK main-web-content logicdes bigint/./svn-repo \
           vectors/vectors.tex mirror/./mirror-latest /some/rsync-dest

With this arrangement you would need to be careful to either not use
--delete or to use some excludes to avoid having a problem with the
main-web-content interacting with the other content that is going into
the same dir.  E.g., you might need to specify options such as:

    --exclude=main-web-content/{logicdes,bigint-svn,math,mirror}

A similar symlink solution could be done on the source side using the
new --copy-dirlinks option, but only if the nesting of directories
allowed it to happen (which does not seem to be the case in your
example).

..wayne..