rsync make parents on remote

jonmcc · 10-30-2011, 09:24 AM

I'd like rsync to create the source dir structure on the remote, when I'm only synching a file in a sub-dir. At the moment it seems I need to do this in 2 commands, e.g..

ssh <remote> mkdir -p /backup/var/spool/cron/crontabs
rsync -vauz /var/spool/cron/crontabs <remote>:/backup/home/var/spool/cron/.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to do this:

rsync -Mvauz /var/spool/cron/crontabs <remote>:/backup/home/var/spool/cron/.

...where M (make parents) is a new option that tells mkdir to do 'mkdir -p' on the remote target dir.

Maybe this is already possible, but I've some some googling & people end up doing it with a few commands.

(apologies if this is already answered in these forums already)

daveginorge · 10-31-2011, 10:46 AM

If you drop the trailing /. it should work
rsync -vauz /var/spool/cron/crontabs <remote>:/backup/home/var/spool/cron

from the rsync man

Quote:

rsync -avz foo:src/bar /data/tmp

this would recursively transfer all files from the directory src/bar
on the machine foo into the /data/tmp/bar directory on the local machine.
The files are transferred in "archive" mode, which ensures that symbolic links,
devices, attributes, permissions, ownerships etc are preserved in the transfer.
Additionally, compression will be used to reduce the size of data portions of the transfer.

rsync -avz foo:src/bar/ /data/tmp

a trailing slash on the source changes this behavior to transfer all files
from the directory src/bar on the machine foo into the /data/tmp/.
A trailing / on a source name means "copy the contents of this directory".
Without a trailing slash it means "copy the directory".
This difference becomes particularly important when using the --delete option.

Hope this helps

jonmcc · 01-09-2012, 08:56 AM

Thanks Dave.

That'll work fine for the "bar" subdir (of src) to get synched under /data/tmp, so you'd end up with /data/tmp/bar. What I want is to end up with /data/tmp/src/bar

So, assuming I only have a /backup dir on the remote box and want the entire directory structure from the source to end up under this, I currently need to create them manually first, e.g...
ssh <remote> mkdir -p /backup/var/spool/cron/crontabs
rsync -vauz /var/spool/cron/crontabs <remote>:/backup/var/spool/cron/.

It would be nice if rsync had an option to do this for you automatically.