Removing folder at destination

[raf]

Fabian Cenedese via rsync wrote:

> >Why not exclude 2_ASSETS from the first run, and then do a second run to
> >rsync the _contents_ of 2_ASSETS to the target 01_us_eng directory?
> >
> >Add /01_us_eng/2_ASSETS/ to the exclude.txt file.
> >
> >rsync -rvz --exclude-from=exclude.txt source destination
> >rsync -rvz source/01_us_eng/2_ASSETS/ destination/01_us_eng/
> >
> >(perhaps add some variation of the exclude.txt file if you're excluding
> >stuff under the 2_ASSETS directory)
> >
> >> My humble question to samba.org is this, can I add an rsync command to move
> >> folders 3 and 4 into 01... and delete the 2_ASSETS folder so I dont have to
> >> manually do this 200 times each day?
> >
> >You can't use rsync to perform remote rename operations, which is what
> >you're essentially asking for.
> 
> You can execute remote commands using ssh/rsh. If the names
> stay the same then you can add the rename commands to a script
> file being executed after the rsync run.
> 
> bye  Fabi

But if you do that, subsequent uses of rsync won't work
any more efficiently than the first one did. It would
have to re-copy the files that have not kept their
original names. That's probably why rsync doesn't do
renaming operations.

You might be better off renaming or moving things at
the source and rsyncing that. If that's not an option,
and the source and destination really need to differ,
you could construct the desired directory layout using
symlinks to the originals, and rsync the alternate
symlink version.

I've done a similar thing when rsyncing files
originally from a macOS host whose names contained
colon characters (representing forward slashes) to a
Windows host where colon characters aren't allowed in
file names. A script would construct the
Windows-friendly view of the files, then rsync that,
then delete the Windows-friendly view afterwards.

That won't work if you need to rsync any symlinks as
symlinks but otherwise, it should be OK.

cheers,
raf