find and rsync?

Question

I want to be able to search for files over 14 days and over 10k and than rsync those found files to a destination.

Is there a way to combine these two commands?

find ./ -mtime +14 -size +10k 
rsync --remove-sent-files -avz /src /dest

Solution

You can send the output of find into rsync using one of the options outlined below.

Method #1

These 2 options are very similar, they both assume you're changing directories to some location and then running the find command from there.

$ rsync -avz --remove-sent-files \
        --files-from=<(find ./ -mtime +14 -size +10k) ./ /dest

You can also use a pipe to feed the list in:

$ find ./ -mtime +14 -size +10k -print0 \
        | rsync -av --files-from=- --from0 ./ /dest

Method #2

This method can be run from anywhere.

$ find /src/dir/ -mtime +14 -size +10k -printf %P\\0 \
        | rsync -av --files-from=- --from0 /src/dir/ /dst/dir/

• printf %P: File's name with the name of the command line argument under which it was found removed. This way, you can use any src directory, no need to cd into your src directory first.

References

• Terminal - rsync + find - commandlinefu.com

Comments

[nick fox]

This is another working example rsync -haviHn --stats --progress --files-from=<(find /mnt/my-files -mtime 0 -printf "%p\n") / /mnt/backup-disk/ Find will return an absolute path so you need to set / as the copy source