rsync only *.php files

Question

How can I rsync mirror only *.php files? This gives me a bunch of empty dirs too and I don't want those.

rsync -v -aze 'ssh ' \
--numeric-ids \
--delete \
--include '*/' \
--exclude '*' \
--include '*.php' \
[email protected]:/home/www/domain.com \
/Volumes/Servers/

Solution

The culprit here is the

--include '*/'  

When including a wildcard followed by the trailing forward-slash you're telling rsync to transfer all files ending with a '/' (that is, all directories).
Thus,

rsync -v -aze 'ssh ' \
--numeric-ids \
--delete \
--exclude '*' \
--include '*.php' \
[email protected]:/home/www/domain.com \
/Volumes/Servers/

If you were using that because you intend to recursively find all .php files, you’d have to use the ** wildcard. That is, --include '**/*.php'

Another way ( http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1481/rsync-find ) is pre-finding the target files and then using rsync,

find source -name "*.php" -print0 | rsync -av --files-from=- --from0 ./ ./destination/

Comments

[Poe]

The rsync command excluded all files, so nothing was transferred. I think what I did was use the original block I tried, and just ran a find command to delete all empty folders when it finished.

[G-Wiz]

Yeah, the catch-all exclude should come after the include.

[Michael]

@G-Wiz Well I wish the answer actually said that - although I can't get it to work either way.