Question

I’m working on a web application where a user uploads a list of files, which should then be immediately rsynced to a remote server. I have a list of all the local files that need to be rsynced, but they will be mixed in with other files that I do not want rsynced every time. I know rsync will only send the changed files, but this directory structure and contents will grow very large over time and the delay would not be acceptable.

I know that doing a remote rsync, I can specify a list of remote files, i.e…

rsync “host:/path/to/file1 /path/to/file2 /path/to/file3”

… but that does not work once I remove “host:” and try to specify the files locally.

I also know I can use –files-from, but that would require me to create a file ahead of time with a list of files that I want to rsync (and then delete it afterwards). I think it’d be cleaner to just effectively say “rsync these 4 specific files to this remote server”, but I can’t seem to get that to work.

Is there any way to do what I’m trying to accomplish, or do I have to resort to creating a tmp file with a list in it?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You should be able to list the files similar to the example you gave. I did this on my machine to copy 2 specific files from a directory with many other files present.

rsync test.sql test2.cpp myUser@myHost:path/to/files/synced/