Re: rsync problem

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:40:00AM -0700, Robert Holtzman <holtzm@cox.net> was heard to say:
> On Mon, 27 Jul 2009, Mike Bird wrote:
> 
> >On Mon July 27 2009 22:59:38 Robert Holtzman wrote:
> >>
> >>Just installed rsync 3.0.3-2 and tried to backup to a usb drive using a
> >>script:
> >>
> >>rsync -vaHz --exclude '/proc' --exclude '/sys' -- exclude '*.iso'
> >>--exclude '/media' /  /media/disk/laptop
> >
> >Does the space between the -- and the exclude exist in the script?
> 
> Yes but it works. the problem is "--exclude '/media'".

  "--" by itself often tells command-line parsers that the rest of the
arguments are to be treated as positional arguments, even if they look
like switches.  rsync's manual page doesn't mention this that I could
see in a quick skim, but that's how it behaves:

    $ mkdir foo
    $ echo > --test
    $ rsync --test foo
    rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.cc(1440) [client=3.0.6]
    $ rsync -- test foo
    $ ls foo
    --test

  So your "--exclude /media" is treated as a request to copy both
"--exclude" and "/media" to the destination.

  Daniel