mjhjmtu

I have a text file list_of_dirs_to_copy with 120 paths:

data/A/backups/2018_02_12
data/B/backups/2/files
data/B/old_files/2015_12
data/C/my_datafiles/800/dat
data/F/backups & old files (second backups)
...

IMPORTANT NOTE: line breaks are LF in the file above and there are special characters such as & and ( in directory names.

data is located in /mnt/storage3/workfiles/backups. So I do cd /mnt/storage3/workfiles/backups so that paths in my list_of_dirs_to_copy become relevant.

Now I want to copy all of the directories listed in my text file (with all of their hidden files and sub-directories) to another hard drive using the following command.

rsync -rvh --append-verify --chmod=ugo=rwX --no-o --no-g --no-perms --progress --stats $list_of_directories /drives/f/data_backups/

How can I pass the list of directories to rsync without breaking it (i.e. receiving Argument list too long)? Would it be possible to send each line of the text to rsync one by one? Would that make sense?

rsync -av ...options... --files-from=list_of_dirs_to_copy 
 /mnt/storage3/workfiles/backups/ 
 /drives/f/data_backups

The paths in list_of_dirs_to_copy would be interpreted as being relative to the source directory. With the given list, this would create data as a subdirectory under /drives/f/data_backups.