rsync - Jun 2005 - Question about include/exclude rules

Hi all,
I'm trying to made a filtered backup of a windows PC.
My target is to create a recursive backup of "only" files reported in
the
include/exclude files (i.e. only *.txt).
the rules (reported below) work well, but also create an empty folders
structure that I don'want.

Rsync works fine for me (the rules are reported below) except a point,
rsync create an empty folders structure that I don'want.

I'm trying to explain better.

Suppose that the source folder is:

./source/a.txt
./source/afolder
./source/afolder/b.txt
./source/afolder/c.doc
./source/bfolder/
./source/bfolder/a.doc
./source/bfolder/
./source/bfolder/cfolder/
./source/bfolder/cfolder/e.doc
 .
I used the following syntax:

rsync -avz --delete-excluded ./source/ ./dest  --exclude-from=exclude.txt

where the rules in the exclude.txt are:

+ *.txt
+ */
- *

rsync create in the dest folder:

./dest/a.txt
./dest/afolder
./dest/afolder/b.txt
./dest/bfolder/
./dest/bfolder/cfolder/

Please note if I omit the rules "+ */", I cannot fetch recursively the
folders and thus the ./source/afolder/b.txt file.
I misleading anything?
There is anyway to exclude the creation of the empty folders?

My environment is:
Win XP Pro SP2
rsync 2.6.4 (from cygwin)

Thanks in advantage,

Luca

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 02:22:22PM +0200, l.corbo@pronetics.it
wrote:
> Rsync works fine for me (the rules are reported below) except a point,
> rsync create an empty folders structure that I don'want.
The only way to get rsync to not create directory hierarchies that don't
contain *.txt files is to actually remove the directories from the
transfer, either through more targeted directory includes, or by using
--files-from (though the latter would not make it easy to delete missing
files).

So, instead of the "+ */" rule you would need to maintain some include
rules, perhaps using something like this perl script:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    use strict;
    my $dir = shift;
    chdir($dir) or die "Unable to chdir to $dir: $!\n";
    print "+ *.txt\n";
    my %hash;
    open(IN, 'find . -name "*.txt" |') or die "Failed to
run find: $!\n";
    while (<IN>) {
	chomp;
	s#^\./##;
	next unless s#/[^/]*\.txt$##;
	my $path = '';
	foreach (split(/\//)) {
	    $path .= $_ . '/';
	    next if $hash{$path};
	    $hash{$path} = 1;
	    print "+ $path\n";
	}
    }
    print "- *\n";

And use it like this:

  new-script ./source | rsync -avz --delete-excluded --exclude-from=- ./source/
./dest

..wayne..