On 11Mar2009 01:52, Matt McCutchen <[email protected]> wrote: | On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 16:13 +1100, Cameron Simpson wrote: | > I know this may seem nonsensical, but I wanted to issue an rsync | > invocation that synced nothing at all. (I wanted to avoid a sync by | > fiddling a config file in some automation rather than changing to | > auomation to have a skip-the-rsync mode.) | > | > Anyway, it seems to me with rsync-3.0.5 that one of: | > | > --exclude=/ | > --exclude=/* | > --exclude=*/ | > | > ought to omit the _entire_ directory tree. In fact, the first seems to do | > nothing (the whole tree gets synced) and the latter two omit everything | > except the top directory itself. | > | > I had hoped to omit everything including the top directory, thus making no | > changes of any kind to the target (yes, I know -n will do that too:-) | > | > Any thoughts? I would have hoped the first (the no-op) would do, | > and feel that maybe it should at least elicit an error message. | | The root directory of the transfer cannot be excluded. That should | probably be stated in the man page,
That would be very nice, yes. | but then I don't see a strong | argument for issuing a warning on --exclude=/ . Not if the afore mentioned corner case is in the manual entry. However, thinking on this and also on some programmatically constructed include/exclude lists I've sometimes made, I can see a use for a debug/verbosity mode that reports include/exclude patterns that never matched, post sync. | To make rsync a no-op, you can use --list-only (which is stronger than | -n in that it doesn't access the destination at all) with --exclude='/*' | to avoid scanning most of the source. Or you could even change the | command name from "rsync" to "true". If those ideas are unacceptable to | you, please explain why and I'll try to come up with something else. No, these are all viable suggestions. Thank you. I was merely seeing just how far I could go by fiddling only the include/exclude stuff and was surprised by the ineffectiveness of "--exclude=/". Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <[email protected]> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ There is a chasm of carbon and silicon the software can't bridge - Haiku Error Messages http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/chal/1998/02/10chal2.html -- Please use reply-all for most replies to avoid omitting the mailing list. To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
