Exclude Certain Files From An rsync Run

The rsync command can be used to copy files from one directory to another (as well as to or from a remote system). It is generally used to broadly synchronize all files in the source directory to a destination directory.

I recently ran into a situation where I wanted to recursively (-a) sync files from a cloned git repository. I didn't want quite everything—namely dotfiles, dot-directories (such as .git/), and top-level markdown files.

This is where the --exclude flag comes in to play.

The dotfiles and dot-directories can be excluded with the .* pattern.

$ rsync -anv --exclude='.*' dir1/ dir2

The top-level markdown files can be excluded, without excluding nested markdown files, with the ./*.md pattern.

$ rsync -anv --exclude='.*' --exclude='./.*md' dir1/ dir2

The -n and -v flags together provide a dry run of this with results that I can check. Once I'm ready to do the real thing, I can remove those.

$ rsync -a --exclude='.*' --exclude='./.*md' dir1/ dir2

See man rsync for more details.