rsync - excluding directories

[Piotr Kirklewski]

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.

[Wilfred Chau_1]

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

[Jared Middleton]

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

[Dennis Handly]

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

[Steven Schweda]

> 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".