How to copy only symbolic links through rsync

Question

How do I copy symbolic links only (and not the file it points to) or other files using rsync?

I tried

rsync -uvrl input_dir output_dir

but I need to exclusively copy the symbolic links only ?

any trick using include exclude options?

Solution 1

Per this question+answer, you can script this as a pipe. Pipes are an integral part of shell programming and shell scripting.

find /path/to/files -type l -print | \
  rsync -av --files-from=- /path/to/files user@targethost:/path

What's going on here?

The find command starts at /path/to/files and steps recursively through everything "under" that point. The options to find are conditions that limit what gets output by the -print option. In this case, only things of -type l (symbolic link, according to man find) will be printed to find's "standard output".

These files become the "standard input" of the rsync command's --file-from option.

Give it a shot. I haven't actually tested this, but it seems to me that it should work.

Solution 2

You can generate a list of files excluding links with find input_dir -not -type l, rsync has an option --exclude-from=exlude_file.txt

you can do it in two steps :

find input_dir -not -type l > /tmp/rsync-exclude.txt

rsync -uvrl --exclude-from=/tmp/rsync-exclude.txt input_dir output_dir

one line bash :

rsync -urvl --exclude-from=<(find input_dir -not -type l | sed 's/^..//') input_dir output_dir

Solution 3

You can do it more easily like:

find /path/to/dir/ -type l -exec rsync -avP {} ssh_server:/path/to/server/ \;

EDIT: If you want to copy symbolic links of the current directory only without making it recursive. You can do:

find /path/to/dir/ -maxdepth 1 -type l -exec rsync -avP {} ssh_server:/path/to/server/ \;

Comments

[Dan]

This won't copy the symlinks as symlinks, though.

[ghoti]

@Dan ... Well, -a translates to -rlptgoD, and -l is documented to, "when symlinks are encountered, recreate the symlink on the destination." What results did you encounter?

[Dan]

Oh! I missed that -a includes -l!