Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I want to synchronize some files from a server to my local machine. Particularly, for each directory and sub-directories contained in the synchronized main one, among all the present files, I would like to synchronize only the one which have a certain defined name (and only the updates of it, excluding the deleting of course).
Which command do i need to be able to do that?
To only copy any file called e.g. myfile from some source to some target:
rsync -n -aim --include='myfile' --include='*/' --exclude='*' source/ target
This uses --include and --exclude to only consider your filename and any directories, but to ignore anything else. Since we're using -m, it would additionally not create directories that does not contain files called myfile.
The -n option stops anything from actually being copied, so you would test this until you are confident that it would work and then remove -n from the command. You should test this on a copy of you backed-up data.
-n from the command line? We're using -m to avoid creating/updating directory entries on the destination that does not contain files with the name we're looking for. If you're syncing against an empty destination directory, you would otherwise end up with a lot of empty directories.
rsync will update a file if its modification timestamp or size changes. If you change a file in such a way that you don't modify any timestamp or the file's size, then it may skip that file. If this is the case, add the -I (--ignore-times) option to the rsync invocation.