Dear reader, We have a home-brewed backup program that uses (for certain dirs) tar and (for others) rsync as backup program, and use a generic mechanism (if a (touched) .exclude file exists in a particular subdir) to build up a list of files to exclude, that we subsequently feed to tars or rsyncs '--exclude-from' option. I noticed a discrepancy, however, in its use: o tar: --exclude-from FILE o rsync: --exclude-from=FILE Is this intentional? My request is to allow '--exclude-from FILE' for rsync, too. Rationale: orthogonality and consistency in (Gnu type) options w/r to tar and rsync. Note that files with spaces still need to be protected in both manners.
Rsync already allows both --OPTION=ARG and --OPTION ARG for its options that take args. Your bigger problem is that the exclude files themselves aren't parsed the same way by the two programs, though there may be some amount of overlap.
Tnx & exsqueeze me, must have overlooked that in the man page. W/r to different parsing of the exclude files by tar and rsync: I realize that and in the way we've programmed our backup script, that doesn't matter: although we backup with -R, we use '/usr/local/blackboard/' (note heading and trailing slash) patterns, as it's matched against the transfer root.