Question

I would like rsync to skip entire directories if they contain a certain file type.

I’m aware of how to exclude files of a certain type. But since I don’t know all the types of files I want to exclude, just that if one type exists the whole dir should be excluded, that is not of much help to me.

Answer 1

I would go this way:

• build a file listing all files:
  find . > allfiles

• get the list of directories not to be rsynced. Since you did not specify what is your criterium, let’s assume it is a file suffix like fop

  find . -path '*fop' | xargs -r -n1 dirname

would give you the list of “forbidden directories”. Here you have to adapt to your case.

• then grep -v the forbidden directories from the whole file list, building a filtered file list

• then rsync with --files-from= switch using the filtered file list