On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 5:18 AM, Anne Wilson <cannewilson at googlemail.com> wrote: > I run several backup scripts by cron, one of which backs up my mail. I do not > want it to back up the Trash folder, but it appears to be doing so. I > conclude that my script is faulty somewhere, and would be grateful for > advice. > > The command is > > rsync -auvz --delete-after --exclude-from=/home/anne/rsync_skiplist_mail.txt /home/anne/Maildir/ /Data3/anne/Maildir/ > > where rsync_skiplist_mail.txt says > > *~ > .[a-z]* > .[A-Z]* > Maildir/.INBOX.Bugs/ > Maildir/.Trash/ > > Comments, please? I've always found exclude patterns to be a trial and error process, mostly errors. They never seem to do what you think they will. As a starting point, I would try putting a / in from of the Maildir patterns and put ** at the end of them. >From "man rsync" (sorry, I know you're a CentOS list regular and have probably read the man page, but sometimes the relevant text fails to stand out): The easiest way to see what name you should include/exclude is to just look at the output when using --verbose and put a / in front of the name (use the --dry- run option if you're not yet ready to copy any files). I think this is one of the weakest features of rsync. I wish they would implement something that would generate more predictable outcomes. -- Jeff