[lug] help with the infamous rsync include/exclude patterns

[Davide Del Vento]

I have this question at
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37198595/how-to-properly-match-directories-with-rsync
if you prefer to answer there. Otherwise keep reading

I need to rsync some directories from one machine to another, but only
part of the tree. I think the easiest way to explain it would be to
run, on the server, tree -f (which prints the full path of each file)
and then grep'ing mon in the full path and rsynch'ing only the matches
of grep. Actually I would be happy to do it that way, but I don't have
shell access to the server, only rsync. Two step solution based on
greping output of rsync --list-only is totally acceptable.

It's actually simpler, because I also know that this mon appears only
as a suffix to a directory (the hierarchy is pretty rigid), so I tried
doing

rsync --dry-run -vrlpt --include='*/' --include='**/*mon/'
--exclude='*' --prune-empty-dirs

but that did not match anything. Ditto for --include='*mon/' instead
of the one with the double asterisk. Avoiding the --prune-empty-dirs
matched all the directories but no files, which I think is my problem.
So I tried to add an include pattern for some file extensions right
before the exclude pattern (which I would rather not do because I
don't want to track them all and they might change), but that simply
matched all those files, including the ones not in the "mon" trees.

And yes, I did see countless examples of people doing similar stuff,
which helped me making some progress (i.e. what you can see above),
but not solve the problem...