INCLUDE/EXCLUDE PATTERN RULES problem on MAC OS

[Matt McCutchen]

On Thu, 2008-09-25 at 14:12 +0200, mathias lambeau wrote:
> I would like to back up several desktop computer, and notebooks who
> are running under Mac OS, on a linux server with ext3 filesystem.
> 
> I try several times with rsync, using include lists
> ( --include-from=my_include_file).
> The include list is working except for directory and filename with
> special character ( like french one : é,è,ù etc ...).
> The pattern in the include list don't match with filesystem, and my file/directory isn't on the backup.

The Mac OS HFS+ filesystem forces all filenames to decomposed UTF-8
characters, while Linux generally uses composed ones.  That means if you
typed in the exclude list on Linux, the special characters may be
composed and fail to match the decomposed characters in the source
filenames (since rsync does a binary comparison).  To fix that, you can
decompose the characters in the include file by running it through
"uconv -x NFD" (D is for decompose); uconv(1) is a command-line tool
that comes with ICU (http://icu-project.org/).

Matt