36

Other than by renaming the files first, how can I rsync files that may have colons in their names?

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3
  • Make sure you are using dir/ and not dir/* in rsync arguments.
    – u1686_grawity
    Commented Apr 19, 2011 at 20:19
  • The problem happens when I rsync from a hard drive to a flash memory stick: rsync: mkstemp "/media/verd/rence/.Using an expressive work: fact or fiction.pdf.RbjlKK" failed: Invalid argument (22) rsync: mkstemp "/media/verd/rence/.What's in a concept: structural foundations for semantic networks.pdf.tLXoZz" failed: Invalid argument (22)
    – WIZARDELF
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 18:40
  • For future readers, please also note that this is filesystem dependent: Windows-typical hard drives with NTFS cannot contain files with : in the first place
    – phil294
    Commented Dec 6, 2019 at 16:36

1 Answer 1

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37

Colons are only special in the first directory component of a command line argument. So if you have what looks like a relative path, prepend ./.

$ mkdir sou:rce
$ rsync -a sou:rce/ de:st/
The source and destination cannot both be remote.
$ rsync -av ./sou:rce/ ./de:st/
sending incremental file list
created directory ./de:st
./

In a script:

case $source in
  /*) :;;
  *) source=./$source;;
esac
case $dest in
  /*) :;;
  *) dest=./$dest;;
esac
rsync "$source" "$dest"
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6
  • Thank you, Guilles. The problem happens when I rsync from a hard drive to a flash memory stick: rsync: mkstemp "/media/verd/rence/.Using an expressive work: fact or fiction.pdf.RbjlKK" failed: Invalid argument (22) rsync: mkstemp "/media/verd/rence/.What's in a concept: structural foundations for semantic networks.pdf.tLXoZz" failed: Invalid argument (22)
    – WIZARDELF
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 18:36
  • 3
    @Kejia柯嘉: Ah, ok, your problem is to rename-and-rsync, not to pass the colons to rsync. This question came up before on the Ubuntu site: How can I substitute colons when I rsync on a USB key? Unfortunately no one's produced a satisfying answer.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 18:46
  • @Gilles'SO-stopbeingevil' How does rsync know, with rsync src ./[email protected]:/test/, if the dest is SSH or local? Here it could be both. Your answer states that prepending ./ makes rsync be sure it's a local path. But it's not 100% sure: ./hello is a valid Linux username (I just tried with useradd). TL;DR: how to rsync with a remote with username ./hello, host b.com, and path /test/?
    – Basj
    Commented Nov 24, 2020 at 15:17
  • @Basj I don't think rsync supports user names containing /. If you're using SSH for transport, I think you can use an ssh_config Host block with a User directive. Note that rsync is likely not the only program that doesn't support / in user names. POSIX only allows ASCII letters, digits and -_.. Debian adduser only allows this and @ (which surprises me because a lot of programs don't support @ in user names!).
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Nov 24, 2020 at 15:43
  • @Gilles'SO-stopbeingevil' It would make sense indeed. adduser a/b gives adduser: To avoid problems, the username should consist only of letters, digits, underscores, periods, at signs and dashes, and not start with a dash (as defined by IEEE Std 1003.1-2001). For compatibility with Samba machine accounts $ is also supported at the end of the username.. I should have tried this first instead of useradd!
    – Basj
    Commented Nov 24, 2020 at 15:52

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