I'm just starting with rsync, googled and experienced a lot, but get stuck with
minimizing the log-file: I only want to see the "real" changes: new, updated and
deleted files/directories in the log-file.
The LOG-file always contains a lot of lines like:

2010/08/31 20:19:01 [24573] .d...p..... send home/hans/Desktop
2010/08/31 20:19:05 [24573] .d...p..... send home/hans/Documents/PCPa

I did not change anything, also not the permissions. So these directories are
unchanged!

Question: how to get rid of these lines, while keeping lines like:

2010/08/31 20:19:01 [24573] >f.stp..... send home/hans/2bedited.txt
2010/08/31 20:19:01 [24573] >f+++++++++ send home/hans/Documents/newfile.txt

Want to use rscync for a "manual backup" (now and then) and my situation is:

Source: workstation with PCLinuxOS 2010.
Destination: a NAS (LaCie Ethernet Disk mini) with a share called Backup,
mounted as /mnt/backup:

[hans@localhost mnt]$ ls -l
...
drwxr-xr-x 4 hans hans 0 2010-08-31 20:18 backup/
...
[hans@localhost mnt]$ ls -l backup
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 hans hans 0 2010-08-31 19:39 deleted/
drwxr-xr-x 9 hans hans 0 2010-08-31 20:18 hans/
drwxr-xr-x 2 hans hans 0 2010-08-31 20:18 updated/
[hans@localhost mnt]$

the rsync command I use is:

rsync -axhhX --stats --delete --delete-excluded --backup
--backup-dir-dels=deleted/`date +%Y-%m-%d` --backup-dir=updated/`date +%Y-%m-%d`
--suffix=.`date +%H%M` --log-file=/home/hans/rsync-files/rsync-log.`date
+%Y%m%d-%H%M` --log-file-format="%i %o %f"
--exclude-from=/home/hans/rsync-files/exclude.txt /home/hans /mnt/backup

NB: also the old mailing list thread "rsync 2.6.4 - directory always updated"
from John Stoffel in 2005 did not help me (I'm not that good in *nix file system
stuff)

Best regards,

Hans Troost

Best way would be to tune rsync to emit less messages or else you could in- or post-process filter the log. I haven't tried this but maybe rsync can output to stdout but *with* your log formatting if you use something like 'rsync $switches --log-file-format="%i %o %f" $switches $source $target' or else maybe with explicitly setting --log-file destination 'rsync $switches --log-file=/dev/stdout --log-file-format="%i %o %f" $switches $source $target'. If that's the case then you could 0) wedge the filter in between rsync and logfile redirection, else 1) just post-process the log: 0) 'rsync $switches| grep -v $REGEX > logfile' or 'rsync --log-file $LOGFILE.temp $switches && grep -v $REGEX $LOGFILE.temp > $LOGFILE.good'. The full regex looks something like this: "^[0-9]\{4\}/[0-9]\{2\}/[0-9]\{2\}.[0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\}.\[[0-9]\{1,10\}\].\.d\.\{3\}p\.\{5\}.send" but just catching the ".d...p..... send" with "^.*\.d\.\{3\}p\.\{5\}.send" will work fine too.

Excellent. Thanks for posting back the solution!