Question

Why is my rsync doing that? It’s basically just making a copy of the someDir folder inside otherDir. If I run the command again after making changes in /path/to/someDir, rsync will sync all files from /path/to/someDir to /path/to/otherDir/someDir. How do I get all the files inside /path/to/someDir synced to /path/to/otherDir.

This is what the command looks like that I’m excuting:

rsync --stats --compress --recursive --times --perms --links --delete --exclude ".git" --exclude "wp-content/upload" --exclude "wp-content/uploads" --exclude "wp-content/gallery" /path/to/someDir /path/to/otherDir

Answer 1

rsync is one of the few commands that make a distinction between /your/path and /your/path/

When you don’t use the trailing backslash you are referring to the directory, while when you use it you are referring to the contents of the directory.

Try

rsync --stats --compress --recursive --times --perms --links --delete --exclude ".git" --exclude "wp-content/upload" --exclude "wp-content/uploads" --exclude "wp-content/gallery" /path/to/someDir/ /path/to/otherDir

That extra trailing slash in /path/to/someDir/ will make the contents of it available in /path/to/otherDir.

BTW: Don’t be tempted to use /path/to/someDir/* as was suggested, that will give you problems when you have many files and it won’t copy files with names beginning with ..