On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 11:35 AM, Sean Carolan scarolan@gmail.com wrote:

I have a string, "2012_10_16"; let's call this $YESTERDAY

How can I rsync a file tree from a remote machine to the local one, including *only* filenames that contain the matching string? I've read the man page and googled around but can't seem to get the syntax right. I either end up syncing all the files, or none of them. Here's how the code looks now (I will remove the dry run once it is working):

rsync -avz --dry-run --include=*$YESTERDAY* remotehost:remotedir/ localdir/transfer/

Rsync's include/exclude syntax is pretty quirky... First it will include everything by default and it applies the directives in the order specified so if you don't want everything you need --exclude='*' at the end of the list. Also, patterns apply to directories, so you need to --include='**' as a special case to keep that exclude from excluding subdirectories. And if you want all filenames including your string you need to put *'s at each end (that's not a quirk, but may be tricky to arrange with variable expansion but not shell wildcard expansion).

Maybe: rsync -avz --dry-run --include='**' --include='*2012_10_16*' --exclude='*' remotehost:remotedir/ localdir/transfer/ Not sure if that traverses all subdirectory levels or if ** is just one level.