rsync not exclusing.

Syth

After a harddrive crash I'm writing a shell script to automatically backup various files using rsync. However the --exclude argument isn't working. Here is the script.

#! /bin/bash
THINGS_TO_BACKUP=('.mozilla' '.vim' 'code' '.gaim' '.eclipse' 'bin' '.xmms' '.vimrc')
EXCLUDE_CMD="--exclude='.mozilla/firefox/p735u1zv.default/Cache/*'"
cd ${HOME}
REMOTE_DIR="backup/"
RSYNC_CMD="rsync -avz --perms ${EXCLUDE_CMD} --delete-excluded ${THINGS_TO_BACKUP[*]} user@remotehost:${REMOTE_DIR}"

echo ${RSYNC_CMD}
${RSYNC_CMD}

As you can see I don't want to backup my Firefox cache, but it does get rsynced. The script will print out the command and then execute the command. If I copy and paste the command into a terminal, the cache directory is not backed up, That's what I want.

The command that's printed and does what I want is:

rsync -avz --perms --exclude='.mozilla/firefox/p735u1zv.default/Cache/*' --delete-excluded .mozilla .vim code .gaim .eclipse bin .xmms .vimrc user@remotehost:backup/

AndrewMc

Syth wrote:

EXCLUDE_CMD="--exclude='.mozilla/firefox/p735u1zv.default/Cache/*'"

As you can see I don't want to backup my Firefox cache, but it does get rsynced. The script will print out the command and then execute the command. If I copy and paste the command into a terminal, the cache directory is not backed up, That's what I want.

As far as I can tell, it's to do with how the quote marks are handled in bash. It should work if you use:

EXCLUDE_CMD=--exclude='.mozilla/firefox/p735u1zv.default/Cache/*'

As I understand it, the outer quote marks are removed, and all internal quote marks are retained. This means it displays the way you want it. When you copy+paste that again, the remaining single quotes are then removed, too, so it works. This second quote removal doesn't happen when executed from the "variable" (not sure why - it just appears to take the whole lot literally). Try this:

#!/bin/bash

TEST="--exclude=hello"
echo TEST is ${TEST}
TEST=--exclude='hello'
echo TEST is ${TEST}
TEST="--exclude='hello'"
echo TEST is ${TEST}

Instead of just running ${RSYNC_CMD}, you could run

eval ${RSYNC_CMD}

which evaluates the string as if entered from the command line rather than taking it literally.

Syth

That was the problem. Thanks. I used the eval method you used. I thought it was something to do with bash since the copy&pasting worked. Thanks.