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   rsync    ( 1 )

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PER-DIRECTORY RULES AND DELETE

Without a delete option, per-directory rules are only relevant on the sending side, so you can feel free to exclude the merge files themselves without affecting the transfer. To make this easy, the 'e' modifier adds this exclude for you, as seen in these two equivalent commands:

rsync -av --filter=': .excl' --exclude=.excl host:src/dir /dest rsync -av --filter=':e .excl' host:src/dir /dest

However, if you want to do a delete on the receiving side AND you want some files to be excluded from being deleted, you'll need to be sure that the receiving side knows what files to exclude. The easiest way is to include the per-directory merge files in the transfer and use --delete-after, because this ensures that the receiving side gets all the same exclude rules as the sending side before it tries to delete anything:

rsync -avF --delete-after host:src/dir /dest

However, if the merge files are not a part of the transfer, you'll need to either specify some global exclude rules (i.e. specified on the command line), or you'll need to maintain your own per-directory merge files on the receiving side. An example of the first is this (assume that the remote .rules files exclude themselves):

rsync -av --filter=': .rules' --filter='. /my/extra.rules' --delete host:src/dir /dest

In the above example the extra.rules file can affect both sides of the transfer, but (on the sending side) the rules are subservient to the rules merged from the .rules files because they were specified after the per-directory merge rule.

In one final example, the remote side is excluding the .rsync- filter files from the transfer, but we want to use our own .rsync-filter files to control what gets deleted on the receiving side. To do this we must specifically exclude the per-directory merge files (so that they don't get deleted) and then put rules into the local files to control what else should not get deleted. Like one of these commands:

rsync -av --filter=':e /.rsync-filter' --delete \ host:src/dir /dest rsync -avFF --delete host:src/dir /dest