mjhjmtu

Any idea why this rsync command could be syncing contents of a home directory instead of the actual path provided?

echo "$REMOTE_STORAGE_PATH: $REMOTE_STORAGE_PATH/files/"

rsync -zqr -e "ssh -p $REMOTE_PORT" --delete $REMOTE_USER@$REMOTE_SERVER:"$REMOTE_STORAGE_PATH/files/" "$FILES_PATH"

REMOTE_STORAGE_PATHhave a correct value (/var/storage), files I want to sync are in /var/storage/files. Yet, what is being synced is a content of the home directory of my REMOTE_USER. Like... what even can cause this? Any ideas?

REMOTE_USER is the owner of the REMOTE_STORAGE_PATH directory, and files subdirectory.

Actually, the most baffling part is that in the same script, almost just before that, I have almost exactly the same line of code:

rsync -zqr -e "ssh -p $REMOTE_PORT" --delete --progress $REMOTE_USER@$REMOTE_SERVER:"$REMOTE_STORAGE_PATH/database.sql" "$DUMPS_PATH/$TARGET.sql"

And that syncs correctly. Like... what?

The issue was resolved in comments.

There was no issue whatsoever with the rsync command. Rather, the remote directory contained files not actually expected to be there.

A short note about the command though,

rsync -zqr 
 -e "ssh -p $REMOTE_PORT" 
 --delete 
 $REMOTE_USER@$REMOTE_SERVER:"$REMOTE_STORAGE_PATH/files/" 
 "$FILES_PATH"

This contains a number of unquoted variable expansions. For safety, I would write this as

rsync -zqr 
 -e "ssh -p '$REMOTE_PORT'" 
 --delete 
 "$REMOTE_USER@$REMOTE_SERVER:$REMOTE_STORAGE_PATH/files/" 
 "$FILES_PATH"

Note that using $variable is exactly the same as $variable unless the immediately following character is a valid character in a variable name, as in $variablex.

In a script, I would additionally always use the long options, if possible, for documentation purposes. But that's my personal opinion. And I would probably use --archive rather than --recursive, to also sync file metadata (timestamps etc.)

rsync --compress --quiet --archive 
 --rsh="ssh -p '$REMOTE_PORT'" 
 --delete 
 "$REMOTE_USER@$REMOTE_SERVER:$REMOTE_STORAGE_PATH/files/" 
 "$FILES_PATH"