rsync - Dec 2007 - Help with complicated heirarchy exclude syntax

I want rsync to do this:
Backup  all files under ~/, except in some cases.

When rsync gets to ~/News, which has an extensive, fluctuating and
deep heirarchy of directories under it.  An example might be:

  News/agent/nntp/news.gmane.org/gmane/comp/lang/perl/beginners/

I want to skip any files that have all numbers for names which would
be under the last directory above.  However there are at least 2 files
in there (.overview .agentview) that I do want rsync to get.

But when rsnyc gets to ~/Mail, which has a much shallower heirarchy
with files that have numbers for names, I want to backup all those and
anywhere else rsync finds files with numbers for names under ~/.

Its a tall order.  I've been ducking it with various other schemes but
would really like to get something like that to work instead of
running several rsync backups schemes against ~/.

How can I tell rsync to go to the bottom of a heirarchy skipping any
files with numbers for names but retrieving .[oa]*view

Yet not skip files with numbers for names anywhere else.

Further, how would I define files with numbers for names?

   *[0-9]
   [0-9]*[0-9] 

would be a couple of ways but even there one might get something like:

   some7
   9and5

Either of those definitions would actually be mostly ok since files
named as I've shown are very unlikely to occur there but still needing
a more precise way to define files like 1, 12, 123, 12345 etc with one
pattern comes up fairly often.

As I understand it, exclude files do not understand regular
expressions.

It appears rsync has complicated options in exclude and filter rules
that suggest I might sprinkle more exclude files throughout the
heirarchy. 

That might work but I don't know what directories might be created
under that heirarchy and it changes fairly often so the .filter files
would need to be fairly shallow where things are permanent.

Further I didn't understand from the man page how the merge-dir and
filter files actually work or what they need to look like.

On Sat, 2007-12-22 at 10:09 -0600, reader@newsguy.com
wrote:
> Further, how would I define files with numbers for names?
> As I understand it, exclude files do not understand regular
> expressions.
Correct, exclude patterns are globs, and there's no glob that matches
files whose names consist entirely of digits.  It would be nice if rsync
supported regular expressions for exclude patterns.  But in this case,
there is a glob for files whose names do not consist entirely of digits:
*[!0-9]* .  You can include these files and then exclude all (other)
files.  The options to do this throughout the copy would be:

--include='*[!0-9]*' --exclude='*'
?
> I want rsync to do this:
> Backup  all files under ~/, except in some cases.
> 
> When rsync gets to ~/News, which has an extensive, fluctuating and
> deep heirarchy of directories under it.  An example might be:
> 
>   News/agent/nntp/news.gmane.org/gmane/comp/lang/perl/beginners/
> 
> I want to skip any files that have all numbers for names which would
> be under the last directory above.  However there are at least 2 files
> in there (.overview .agentview) that I do want rsync to get.
> 
> But when rsnyc gets to ~/Mail, which has a much shallower heirarchy
> with files that have numbers for names, I want to backup all those and
> anywhere else rsync finds files with numbers for names under ~/.
> 
> Its a tall order.  I've been ducking it with various other schemes but
> would really like to get something like that to work instead of
> running several rsync backups schemes against ~/.
> 
> How can I tell rsync to go to the bottom of a heirarchy skipping any
> files with numbers for names but retrieving .[oa]*view
> 
> Yet not skip files with numbers for names anywhere else.
To get the rules to apply only in ~/News, anchor the patterns and use
the ** syntax to match anything below ~/News.  The patterns are matched
against files' full paths from ~, but the first pattern accepts a
non-numeric character only in the basename because the final * cannot
match slashes.

--include='/News/**[!0-9]*' --exclude='/News/**'

Matt