rsync - Nov 2007 - Keeping individual dirlinks

It would be nice if rsync offered a way to specify individual dirlinks
to keep without keeping all dirlinks.  (Unison can do this.)  For
example, consider the following command:

rsync -a --relative src/./ dest/

If rsync refrained from trimming a trailing /. off of source arguments
(at least as an option), one could keep a dirlink by passing it as an
additional source argument with a /. and excluding the non-/. version so
that rsync does not see the symlink to convert it to a directory:

rsync -a --relative --exclude='/mydirlink' src/./ src/./mydirlink/.

AFAICT, this wouldn't worsen daemon security because any destination
symlink a crafty client could follow using the /. syntax he could
already follow by passing a destination path that goes through it.

Matt

On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 03:57:11PM -0500, Matt McCutchen
wrote:
> If rsync refrained from trimming a trailing /. off of source arguments
> (at least as an option), one could keep a dirlink by passing it as an
> additional source argument with a /. and excluding the non-/. version so
> that rsync does not see the symlink to convert it to a directory:
That already works just by specifying a relative source path with a
trailing slash.  Since rsync always sends implied dirs as dirs now, any
symlink that is discovered during the directory scan is discarded as a
duplicate:

mkdir src realdir
touch src/file1 realdir/file2
ln -s ../realdir src/sym
rsync -avRii src/./ src/./sym/ dest/

..wayne..