Tricky Quoting Issue in BASH

[Andy Bradford]

Thus said Charles Curley on Sun, 01 Jan 2006 12:49:52 MST:

> I'd  like to  run an  rsync  command to  do backups,  with an  exclude
> pattern. I  can build what looks  like a perfectly good  command, echo
> it, then  run it. But  the exclude pattern  is ignored. However,  if I
> copy the echoed command line and execute it directly, it works and the
> exclude pattern is respected.

While I realize this doesn't exactly address the quoting problem, I have
found -C to be a very useful option to handle this kind of thing. Simply
place a .cvsignore file  with the items you want excluded  at the top of
the tree  in which  you have exclusions  and -C does  all the  rest. For
example, to ignore a subtree called bar under foo:

$ find /foo
/foo/bar
/foo/baz
/foo/bat
/foo/ban

$ echo 'bar' > /foo/.cvsignore

Now calling rsync with -C will ignore /foo/bar when backing up /foo

Andy
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