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I want to back up all the hidden files and directories in my homedir using rsync, but not the non-hidden files and directories.
For example, given this directory listing:
drwxr-xr-x 7 sophie sophie 238 31 Mar 08:45 .
drwxr-xr-x 15 sophie sophie 510 31 Mar 08:14 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 sophie sophie 4 31 Mar 08:12 .foo
drwxr-xr-x 3 sophie sophie 102 31 Mar 08:45 .hiddendir
drwxr-xr-x 4 sophie sophie 136 31 Mar 08:13 VisibleDirectory
-rw-r--r-- 1 sophie sophie 9 31 Mar 08:13 VisibleFile
I want to back up .foo, .hiddendir, and all the contents of .hiddendir whether they are hidden or not. I don't want to back up VisibleDirectory or VisibleFile.
All the incantations I have come up with back up ".", and therefore all its contents including VisibleFile and VisibleDirectory, and I can't figure out how to exclude it. Please help!
I'm using Mac OS X 10.5.6 (Leopard) and rsync version 2.6.9 protocol version 29.
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Thus, rsync never receives the hidden files as arguments. So the solution is to use entire directory name (instead of asterisk) as argument to rsync command. Note: The trailing slashes at the end of both paths. Any other syntax may lead to unexpected results!
If we just add the directory itself as a parameter, no globbing takes place, and rsync even copies dotfiles.
Rsync with --ignore-existing-files: We can also skip the already existing files on the destination. This can generally be used when we are performing backups using the –link-dest option, while continuing a backup run that got interrupted. So any files that do not exist on the destination will be copied over.
If you want to copy a directory with its sub-directory and all contents from one location to another within your system, you can do so as by typing rsync followed by the source and destination directory. Note: Specifying “/” after the source directory only copies the contents of the directory.
A common pattern to match the hidden items is .[^.]*
rsync -a ~/.[^.]* /path/to/backup
This copies all files starting with a single dot. Note that it doesn't include files starting with more than one dot.
53
It's usually ".??*" to make sure you don't copy "." and ".."
(What if you had a file that was just ".a" ?)
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