Users who use xattrs for many different purposes are likely to want to preserve some xattrs but not others. Thus, it would be nice to have a name-based hide/protect filtering system for xattrs just like the ones for files. Filters could be specified with an --xattr-filter option; I see no need to add corresponding syntactic-sugary --xattr-{in,ex}clude{,-from} options. For example, if src/ has been indexed by Beagle and I want to copy it to dest/, copying over all xattrs except the Beagle ones, I could run: rsync -aX --xattr-filter='H user.Beagle.*' src/ dest/
*** Bug 5300 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I would like to second this request, especially to be able to use comment #2 from this bug: https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6546
The 'x' modifier was added a while back to make a filter rule apply to xattr names instead of file names.