Copying folders from file except subfolders from file

Question

I want to copy some directories and files. I have made list of them (absolute path), but some of them contains folders I don't want (exclude folders also having absolute path). I want to copy only include and deeper (without files/folders mentioned in exclude) but this, and other versions I made does not seem to be running well.

rsync -rz  --exclude-from="$exclude" --include-from="$include" . $repository_path

Let say thats the file sturcture

file include has two rows:

/a
/b

file exclude:

/a/aa

And desired output:

Answer 1

Let's drill it out with your file structure. First of all we create testsync directory to play within:

mkdir testsync && cd testsync
mkdir -p a/aa/whatever b/bb c/whatever c/noneed
touch a/file.txt a/picture.jpg b/bb/morefiles.txt b/txt.txt

Lets check it out with tree:

.
├── a
│   ├── aa
│   │   └── whatever
│   ├── file.txt
│   └── picture.jpg
├── b
│   ├── bb
│   │   └── morefiles.txt
│   └── txt.txt
└── c
    ├── noneed
    └── whatever

We create include.dat file with contents:

- /a/aa/*
+ /
+ /a
+ /a/***
+ /b
+ /b/***
- *

More about syntax of include/exclude file in manual (man rsync) in section INCLUDE/EXCLUDE PATTERN RULES.

You HAVE TO include each directory with it's ancestor so it could be synced. That is why / and /a with /a/*** (triple asterisk for all directory contents within) is included

We create another directory outside of testsync: targetsync and test:

rsync -az --include-from=include.dat ~/testsync/ ~/targetsync/

Now when we go to targetsync directory and use tree to get the picture:

.
├── a
│   ├── aa
│   ├── file.txt
│   └── picture.jpg
└── b
    ├── bb
    │   └── morefiles.txt
    └── txt.txt