rsync list of files

[amlife]

Hello

I have a text file which has full path to the files such as

cat list.txt

/etc/hosts
/etc/resolve.conf

I would like to incorporate this will rsync to copy/update changes to another directory.

How can I go about doing that?

I have tried using the following

 rsync -avc `cat list.txt' /backup

but it doesn't work! can someone help??

Thank you

[Irithori]

man rsync

says
--files-from=FILE

This should be waht you want.

[amlife]

I have tried that, but no luck, it keeps complaining about some errors, any other way to do it?

[Irithori]

--files-from works.

It would be helpful if you show, what you did and what the error exactly is (in CODE tags plase).

[amlife]

if I run the following

rsync -avnc --files-from=list.txt /tmp

I get a dump of rsync help options!!

[Irithori]

ah ok.

You need to provide a source, even if the files are actually picked from the file list.
Btw, the man page does show this : The SRC is never optional.

In your case, /etc might be a good source.
The filelist then needs to be relative to /etc.

A source of / is possible, and then you could use absolute paths in your filelist.
But I wouldnt recommend that.
A small mistake and you might end up rsyncing your whole system.

[amlife]

rsync -avnc --files-from=list.txt /tmp

it dumps rsync help to the screen and it doesn't sync anything ...

[Irithori]

As I said.
You need to
1) provide a SRC. In the example, I used /etc
2) adjust your list.txt, so that the files are relative to SRC

rsync -av --files-from=list.txt /etc/ /tmp

[amlife]

it worked! you are the man

it is very tricky, I have to admit , and I had to provide full path for --files-from and source and dest

Thanks your input ...

This was one of the error I was running into while I was trying to get it to work.

root@ubuntu:/tmp# rsync -av --files-from=/root/list.txt /etc/ /tmp
building file list ... rsync: link_stat "/etc/etc/hosts" failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link_stat "/etc/etc/resolv.conf" failed: No such file or directory (2)
done

[theMickey]

root@ubuntu:/tmp# rsync -av --files-from=/root/list.txt /etc/ /tmp
building file list ... rsync: link_stat "/etc/etc/hosts" failed: No such file or directory (2)

As Irithori said:

2) adjust your list.txt, so that the files are relative to SRC

"/etc/hosts" (which is in your list.txt file) is NOT relative to your source (which is /etc/). All file names starting with "/" are absolute path/file names. You have to replace "/etc/hosts" with "./hosts" or just "hosts" or "../etc/hosts" when using /etc/ as source.