1.1 KiB
Exclude Certain Files From An rsync Run
The rsync command can be used to copy files from one directory to another (as
well as to or from a remote system). It is generally used to broadly
synchronize all files in the source directory to a destination directory.
I recently ran into a situation where I wanted to recursively (-a) sync files
from a cloned git repository. I didn't want quite everything—namely dotfiles,
dot-directories (such as .git/), and top-level markdown files.
This is where the --exclude flag comes in to play.
The dotfiles and dot-directories can be excluded with the .* pattern.
$ rsync -anv --exclude='.*' dir1/ dir2
The top-level markdown files can be excluded, without excluding nested markdown
files, with the ./*.md pattern.
$ rsync -anv --exclude='.*' --exclude='./.*md' dir1/ dir2
The -n and -v flags together provide a dry run of this with results that I
can check. Once I'm ready to do the real thing, I can remove those.
$ rsync -a --exclude='.*' --exclude='./.*md' dir1/ dir2
See man rsync for more details.