Feature request: interactive skip file

Andreas Lindhé lindhe94 at gmail.com
Mon Dec 23 09:46:38 UTC 2019


Hi! I'm a long time user of rsync, and a big fan. First of all; thanks for
creating it and making it FOSS.

I just thought of a feature that I think could be very useful, but I'm not
familiar enough with the rsync code (and probably not skilled enough) to
create it myself. So thought I'd just post it here in case someone gets  a
creative fit. :)

Sometimes when I transfer files, there are files I wish to skip. For static
setups I know how to make use of things like --exclude-from, but that
requires me to know on beforehand which files to skip. That's great for my
regular backups. But more commonly, I just want to transfer a large-ish
directory with a bunch of misc files in it. Since I'm not about to dig into
it and understand what files are good to keep, I'll just wait a bit longer
for the transfer.

When I did that just now, I realized I was transferring a file named
10_GiB_random.dat which is exactly what it sounded like. Never mind why
that file was there, but it was. It would have been bliss to just hit a
button and make rsync skip that file. My idea is inspired by the way git
add -p does it; letting me skip  a chunk by pressing n (or add it by y). I
feel a similar system would be useful in rsync.

If you know that for some technical reason, this would not be possible to
do with rsync (maybe file transfer lists and what-not could screw things
over), please let me know! As I said, I'm probably not one to implement
such a thing, but just on the off-chance that I do, it'd be nice to know
the odds for success.

-- 
    Andreas Lindhé
    Lindhe94 at gmail.com
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