RClone - Filtering

Filtering, includes and excludes

Rclone has a sophisticated set of include and exclude rules. Some of these are based on patterns and some on other things like file size.

The filters are applied for the copy, sync, move, ls, lsl, md5sum, sha1sum, size, delete and check operations. Note that purge does not obey the filters.

Each path as it passes through rclone is matched against the include and exclude rules like --include, --exclude, --include-from, --exclude-from, --filter, or --filter-from. The simplest way to try them out is using the ls command, or --dry-run together with -v.

Patterns

The patterns used to match files for inclusion or exclusion are based on “file globs” as used by the unix shell.

If the pattern starts with a / then it only matches at the top level of the directory tree, relative to the root of the remote. If it doesn’t start with / then it is matched starting at the end of the path, but it will only match a complete path element:

file.jpg  - matches "file.jpg"
          - matches "directory/file.jpg"
          - doesn't match "afile.jpg"
          - doesn't match "directory/afile.jpg"
/file.jpg - matches "file.jpg" in the root directory of the remote
          - doesn't match "afile.jpg"
          - doesn't match "directory/file.jpg"

Important Note that you must use / in patterns and not \ even if running on Windows.