How to use rsync to delete files but keep directories

Question

I'm trying to use rsync to keep to folders in sync. Let's call them SRC and DST. When I delete a file in SRC and I run my rsync command, I want the corresponding file in to be deleted. When I delete a directory in SRC, I want all corresponding files to be deleted in DST but to keep the empty directory structure.

Is it possible ?

Answer 1

Perhaps you could do it, doing first a find in your SRC, and looking for empty directories, putting this directories in an exclude file and then passing this exclude file to rsync. Then it could work.

To find your empty dirs do

find SRC -type d -empty > SRC-empty-dirs.dat

Do alter

rsync --exclude-from=SRC-empty-dirs.dat SRC DEST

to exclude from a file.

BUT I didn't test this myself.