rsync - Jul 2004 - include/exclude patterns to copy just certain files?

I am attempting to copy only certain files down a directory tree.  I
know which files I want.  I could generate a file of just those with
'find'.  But having read the docs I have been trying to use the
--include and --exclude patterns to have rsync pick the right files
itself.  But I can't figure it out.  I am suspecting that I can't do
what I want to do.

Source example, this is what I have, foos and bars are files:

  dir1/a1/foo
  dir1/a2/foo
  dir1/a3/bar
  dir1/bar
  dir2/a1/foo
  dir2/a2/foo
  dir2/a3/bar
  dir2/bar

Destination example, this is what I want, just the foos:

  dir1/a1/foo
  dir2/a1/foo

Here is how I am trying to do it.

  rsync -a --include '**/a1/foo' --exclude "*" .
example.com:/tmp/

But that does not match any files.  "0 files to consider" is the
result.  The man page has an example with --include "*/".

  rsync -a --include '*/' --include '**/a1/foo' --exclude
"*" . example.com:/tmp/

That does too much and creates all of the directories even if there is
no file "foo" in the directory.  That is, in my example above all of
the */a2 directories are also copied.

Can anyone think of a way to do this?

The actual source directories are relatively large with 20k total
files or so in a deep hiearchy tree.  So expanding them on the command
line is not good since it will frequently exceed ARG_MAX.
Conceptually something like the following would work if the directory
was not too big and I could also line up the destination to match the
source.

  rsync -a $(find . -name foo -print) example.com:/tmp/  # bad example

  for file in $(find . -name foo -print); do  # another bad example
    dirname=$(dirname $file)
    rsync -a $file example.com:$dirname/  # 20k times seconds per ssh...
  done

That is just very, very slow.  I can almost use fsh but just the same
it would be much cleaner to do this entirely within rsync.

Thanks
Bob

On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 05:25:05PM -0600, Bob Proulx
wrote:
>   rsync -a --include '*/' --include '**/a1/foo' --exclude
"*" . example.com:/tmp/
Yes, that is the way to use include/exclude without first figuring
out where all the foo files are.  As you noted that results in all
directories in the tree being created.

The easiest way around this is to switch from include/exclude to using
the --files-from option, like this:

find . -name foo | rsync -a --files-from=- . example.com:/tmp/

..wayne..