topic Re: rsync - excluding directories in Operating System - Linux

rsync - excluding directories

Piotr Kirklewski — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 14:59:43 GMT

Hi there
I need to copy all the .txt files from certain directory and it's subdirectories preserving timestamps permissions etc.
Rsync is great for that but I ccan't find out how to tell it not to copy the directories - just the files.

Re: rsync - excluding directories

Wilfred Chau_1 — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 22:01:39 GMT

did you supply the -r or -a flag in the rsync command?

that is a normal behavior for rsync. Best bet would be to cd into the dir/sub dir first, then do a rsync *.txt dest:/dir

Re: rsync - excluding directories

Jared Middleton — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 16:55:40 GMT

Assuming transfer is from a remote host to local, you could try a kludge like this:
dir=$(mktemp -d) && rsync -a --include '*/' --include='*.txt' --exclude='*' SOURCEHOST:/SOURCEDIR/ $dir && find $dir -type f -exec mv {} TARGETDIR \; && rm -rf $dir

Re: rsync - excluding directories

Dennis Handly — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 18:27:56 GMT

What do you mean by excluding directories? Did you want to flatten the directory structure?

Re: rsync - excluding directories

Steven Schweda — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 20:30:21 GMT

> What do you mean by excluding directories?
> Did you want to flatten the directory
> structure?

That was my guess. As usual, showing an
actual example might be more helpful than a
vague description.

If you're not wedded to rsync, then the
Info-ZIP Zip and UnZip programs (both) offer
a "-j" option to avoid storing or restoring
directories. I'd also expect that GNU "tar"
options like --strip-components and/or
--transform should be able to do the job at
extraction. Either way, it should be
possible to preserve the date-time, UID+GID,
and permission info.

http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/transform.html

> [...] it's subdirectories [...]

That's "its subdirectories".