[linux] rsync copy over only certain types of files using include option

I use the following bash script to copy only files of certain extension(in this case *.sh), however it still copies over all the files. what's wrong?

from=$1
to=$2

rsync -zarv  --include="*.sh" $from $to

Here's the important part from the man page:

As the list of files/directories to transfer is built, rsync checks each name to be transferred against the list of include/exclude patterns in turn, and the first matching pattern is acted on: if it is an exclude pattern, then that file is skipped; if it is an include pattern then that filename is not skipped; if no matching pattern is found, then the filename is not skipped.

To summarize:

• Not matching any pattern means a file will be copied!
• The algorithm quits once any pattern matches

Also, something ending with a slash is matching directories (like find -type d would).

Let's pull apart this answer from above.

rsync -zarv  --prune-empty-dirs --include "*/"  --include="*.sh" --exclude="*" "$from" "$to"

1. Don't skip any directories
2. Don't skip any .sh files
3. Skip everything
4. (Implicitly, don't skip anything, but the rule above prevents the default rule from ever happening.)

Finally, the --prune-empty-directories keeps the first rule from making empty directories all over the place.

One more addition: if you need to sync files by its extensions in one dir only (without of recursion) you should use a construction like this:

rsync -auzv --include './' --include '*.ext' --exclude '*' /source/dir/ /destination/dir/

Pay your attention to the dot in the first --include. --no-r does not work in this construction.

EDIT:

Thanks to gbyte.co for the valuable comment!

If someone looks for this… I wanted to rsync only specific files and folders and managed to do it with this command: rsync --include-from=rsync-files

With rsync-files:

my-dir/
my-file.txt

- /*

Wrote this handy function and put in my bash scripts or ~/.bash_aliases. Tested sync'ing locally on Linux with bash and awk installed. It works

selrsync(){
# selective rsync to sync only certain filetypes;
# based on: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11111793/588867
# Example: selrsync 'tsv,csv' ./source ./target --dry-run
types="$1"; shift; #accepts comma separated list of types. Must be the first argument.
includes=$(echo $types| awk  -F',' \
    'BEGIN{OFS=" ";}
    {
    for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++ ) { if (length($i) > 0) $i="--include=*."$i; } print
    }')
restargs="$@"

echo Command: rsync -avz --prune-empty-dirs --include="*/" $includes --exclude="*" "$restargs"
eval rsync -avz --prune-empty-dirs --include="*/" "$includes" --exclude="*" $restargs
}

Avantages:

short handy and extensible when one wants to add more arguments (i.e. --dry-run).

Example:

selrsync 'tsv,csv' ./source ./target --dry-run

The answer by @chepner will copy all the sub-directories irrespective of the fact if it contains the file or not. If you need to exclude the sub-directories that dont contain the file and still retain the directory structure, use

rsync -zarv  --prune-empty-dirs --include "*/"  --include="*.sh" --exclude="*" "$from" "$to"