I'm trying to use rsync to backup folders containing a certain word, using ls, grep and rsync. However rsync does not seem to accept output from grep as input. I've tried the following:
$ ls -d $PWD/** | grep March | rsync -av 'dst'
This does nothing really, even though using just ls -d $PWD/** | grep March produces exactly the list of folders I want to move.
$ ls -d $PWD/** | grep March | xargs -0 | rsync -av 'dst'
$ ls -d $PWD/** | grep March | xargs -0 echo | rsync -av 'dst'
$ ls -d $PWD/** | grep March | xargs -0 rsync -av 'dst'
Many(including dst, here I escape space with \) of the folders contains spaces I thought that might cause problems and found xargs might be of help, but still doesn't move anything.
I have tried the above with sudo, the -avuoption for rsync and -r even though this i included in the -aoption. I usually use the --dry-run option for rsync but I've also tried without. What am I doing wrong?
Is it possible to pipe input to rsync like this?
I'm on OSX 10.13.3. GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)
Thank you.
Using the problematic ls and grep, what you want is likely:
ls -d "$PWD"/** | grep March | xargs -r -n1 -I'{}' rsync -av '{}' 'dst'
A better method is to use --include-from
One option is to let bash emulate a named pipe:
rsync -av0 --include-from=<(find . -path '*March*' -print0) "$PWD"/ /dst/
You can also pipe the find output instead:
find . -path '*March*' -print0| rsync -av0 --include-from=- "$PWD"/ /dst/
-path is used to find "March" anywhere in the filename. (similar to grep)
(rsync might have some parameters to do the filtering itself as well, like the --include and --exclude patterns)
Something like this (untested). See here
rsync -av --include="*/" --include="*March*" --exclude="*" "$PWD"/ /dst/