I am struggling to find the correct inclusion, exclusion or filter options to cope with the following cases:

Copying a directory with many subdirectories from one host to another,
excluding a top level subdirectory .ignore, and including all files except those named *.xls

and

copying the same directory and subdirectories,
excluding the same top level subdirectory .ignore and including only the files named *.xls

The purpose of this strange arrangement is to include checksum comparison only for files named *.xls without the huge overhead of checksum testing all the other files. This is to overcome an application error in which the contents of a few .xls files have been changed in the source directory between successive rsync runs without changing the last-modified timestamp.

So far I have not managed to separate the treatment of *.xls files from all the others. Either all the files or none are copied.

fthynne, please start a new thread to request help with your problem rather than hang a completely unrelated question on a 4-year-old thread.

I will give you one hint:

14 years old

Reported for necroposting, man question, homework, human google

jlinkels

LOL. I got very bad at math once I learned how to make computers do it for me!

With apologies. I could not see how to start a new thread (I see now that I was trying from the wrong context) and this was the only one I discovered with relevant postings. I can now see that there are other threads in General and Networking that might help me.