Bash scripting rsync: rsync: link_stat (blah) failed: No such file or directory (2)

Question

I am trying to write a simple bash script for my local (Mac OS X) machine to move files from a directory on my machine to a remote machine. This line is failing:

rsync --verbose  --progress --stats --compress --rsh=ssh \       --recursive --times --perms --links --delete \       --exclude "*bak" --exclude "*~" \       /repository/* $DEV_SERVER:$REMOTE_DIR 

$DEV_SERVER and $REMOTE_DIR are defined previously, and I echo them to verify they're accurate.

The error I'm getting is:

rsync: link_stat /Users/myusername/mycurrentdirectory failed: No such file or directory (2) 

To note here is that rather than using the defined directory (/repository, which is in the root of the machine), it uses my working directory. What is causing this?

Answer 1

Check that your \ characters have no whitespace after them at the end of the line. This will cause BASH to not interpret the line wrap correctly, giving the rsync error above.

Answer 2

Remove the '*' from the source location, rsync knows to look in the inside of the directory if you specify the '/' in the end

like that:

rsync --verbose  --progress --stats --compress --rsh=ssh --recursive --times --perms --links --delete --exclude "*bak" --exclude "*~" /repository/ $DEV_SERVER:$REMOTE_DIR