client : mac os x 10.5.7, darwin kernel version 9.7.0 server : Linux Ubuntu 2.6.24-19-server #1 SMP x86_64 GNU/L cmd : /usr/local/bin/rsync -avz -i --iconv=UTF8-MAC,ISO-8859-15 --delete -e ssh /Users/toto/Documents toto@X.X.X.X:/home/MACUSERS/toto/ In the past i faced problems since users have accentuated charcaters (or weird characters in file/directory names), rsync reports : ****[generator] cannot convert filename:these/cours... the only thing i had to do is to rename the file with deleting weird characters. On one of my clients rsync is stuck (CTRL+C to terminate the job, no network traffic) and reports that error : sending incremental file list .d..t...... these/Protocoles/melting pot/ cd+++++++++ these/Protocoles/melting pot/poly busc/ <f+++++++++ these/Protocoles/melting pot/poly busc/.DS_Store cd+++++++++ these/Protocoles/melting pot/poly busc/BIO (Biochemistry)/ <f+++++++++ these/Protocoles/melting pot/poly busc/BIO (Biochemistry)/.DS_Store <f+++++++++ these/Protocoles/melting pot/poly busc/BIO (Biochemistry)/BIO- 2D Electrophoresis_bio_rad.doc ***CTRL+C rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4 bytes to socket [sender]: Broken pipe (32) rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (588 bytes received so far) [sender] rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(600) [sender=3.0.6] In that case moving the "these/Protocoles/melting pot/poly busc" directory solves the problem, but rsync does not give any error related to weird characters ([generator] cannot convert filename) on that directory, i tried adding "vv" for more verbose but with no success.
in that case you probably want to do a character conversion, which is not possible, this is to be expected, charset conversion isn't the primary goal of rsync, so don't expect rsync to handle such cases gracefully. You can use convmv on the target side also.