rsync filters

[Nifty Ubuntu]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Smoot Carl-Mitchell <smoot at tic.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2009-09-24 at 13:34 -0400, Hal Burgiss wrote:
>
> > What really does not make sense to me, is that I have excluded all toplevel
> > directories. Yet there is different behavior from some as compared to others.
> > Eg, /bin wants to be deleted, /sys does not. Yet, they are specified in
> > *identical* syntax.
>
> Another possibility is the way -F works.  It looks for .rsync-filter
> files in each merged directory.  I'd see if there are any
> extraneous .filter-rules files lying around.  It appears you really want
> a single configuration file with all your exclude rules.  You can use
> the --exclude-from=FILE for this purpose or if you want the more general
> --filter syntax you can use the "merge" filter rule to point to a single
> filtering file.

It may also be "cleaner" to script up multiple rsync commands for
each directory of interest.  Also checkout "per directory" filter files.

You use of -F is key;  From the man page:
    -F     The  -F  option  is a shorthand for adding two --filter rules to
              your command.  The first time it is used is a shorthand for this
              rule:

                 --filter=’dir-merge /.rsync-filter’

              This  tells  rsync to look for per-directory .rsync-filter files
              that have been sprinkled through the  hierarchy  and  use  their
              rules  to  filter the files in the transfer.