rsync: skip files for which I don't have permissions

Question

I'm using rsync -rlptD to copy a directory from another user. There are a few files (I have no way of knowing these in advance) which I don't have permission to copy. Is there a way have rsync ignore these. The trouble is that if rsync return non-zero my bash -x script will exit.

Answer 1

Rsync doesn't have an option for this. I see two solutions. One is to parse rsync error messages; this isn't very robust. The other is to generate a list of unreadable files to filter.

cd /source/directory
exclude_file=$(mktemp)
find . ! -readable -o -type d ! -executable |
  sed -e 's:^\./:/:' -e 's:[?*\\[]:\\1:g' >>"$exclude_file"
rsync -rlptD --exclude-from="$exclude_file" . /target/directory
rm "$exclude_file"

If your find doesn't have -readable and -executable, replace them by the appropriate -perm directive.

This assumes that there are no unreadable files whose name contains a newline. If you need to cope with those, you'll need to produce a null-delimited file list like this, and pass the -0 option to rsync:

find . \( ! -readable -o -type d ! -executable \) -print0 |
  perl -0000 -pe 's:\A\./:/:' -e 's:[?*\\[]:$1:g' >>"$exclude_file"