Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Hidden directories are ignored during incremental backup

[Michael Grant]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 04:18, Marcel (Felix) Giannelia <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 01/06/09 18:45, John covici wrote:
>>
>> I think this is a problem in the fact that * never includes anything
>> beginning wth . character.  To do this, you need to back up a superior
>> directory to the Mail directory and that will work -- I do it all the
>> time.
>>
>
> A good way I've found to get the dot files without going up a directory
> (sometimes you really don't want the extra directory level) is the pattern
> "* .[^.]*", e.g.
>
> ls * .[^.]*
>
> will give you a list of all files and directories in the current dir,
> including dot files but without "." and ".."  -- I learned the hard way that
> ".*" is a very bad idea because it does match "." and ".." :)

I use .??* for this.  This unfortunately misses .a, .b, .c... etc, but
it's rare to find files like that.  I guess you could combine both of
these to pick up all the . files like this:

   .[^.] .??*

(n.b. these are 2 separate arguments, there's a space after the ] and
before the .)