Unable to exclude .DS_store in rsync

Question

My code

rsync -exclude='.gitconfig' -exclude='*~' -exclude='.DS_Store' /Users/Masi/bin/ /Users/Masi/gitHub/dvorak/

I run it. It copies the .DS_Store to the destination folder although it should not.

This suggests me that the first exclusion do not work. It seems to be hard-coded in Git's default ignore -file to ignore .gitconfig.

How can you avoid the coping of .DS_Store?

Answer 1

It looks like you're missing a dash on your "--exclude" flags. Without it, I suspect rsync is thinking you're passing it a -e flag with the value "xclude=.DS_Store"; not at all what you want.

Answer 2

Try the following. Place your list of items to exclude in a file

~/.rsync/exclude

One per line (wildcards acceptable).

Then use the appropriate option to read the exclusions from that file:

--exclude-from=~/.rsync/exclude

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