It would be a nice to have if rsync gives a stats about skipped dirs (eg. those from an exclude file). background: If someone is using rsync to backup an entire system except directories like tmp/, .ccache and so on - then in case of restoring such a system after an accident he needs the perms and ownership of the skipped dirs.
You can exclude all the contents of the temporary dirs and still copy the dirs themselves: --exclude='/tmp/*' .
Fine - but can I use the same syntax w/ using an exclude file ?
Yes. If you need to append the * to every line of an existing exclude file, you can do that in an automated fashion with sed.
Yep - works. (Now I've only to test whether tar excepts that file too as it doee it before "/*" was appended to every line)