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Forum Discussion
selective sync from command line
I work on different computers, running Windows, Linux and MacOS. I am compiling C++ programs on each computer, from the same source. There is no use syncing compiled objects and executables across different operating systems, but I would prefer that compiled files be in the same directory (for instance, called Objects or Executables), but I do not want to sync them, otherwise compiling on one computer will overwrite the files from another. Therefore, I want to select certain directories as being non-syncable. There are too many of these for me to want to do this by hand (particularly having to do it repeatedly on different computers) so I wondering of there is a way of doing this by a command line, which I can then put in a script, with commands something like:
dropbox_config -sync=False A/B/Objects
(what I am looking for here is some sort of command, like the command dropbox_config that I invented here)
Then I can generate and run a script to do them all at once. A script that will run on Windows (perhaps in a Ubuntu shell), or on Linux, MacOs, or all of these would be good.
3 Replies
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- Lusil
Dropbox Staff
Hi rihartley, thanks for dropping by!
What you're looking for sounds like what is described in this article, where you can set a file or folder to be "ignored" from syncing.
Check it out and let me know if it helps. Cheers!
This is great. I understand now how Dropbox uses Auxiliary Data Streams on Windows, with a stream called com.dropbox.ignore.
However, it leads to the follow-up: I see that doing this will set Dropbox to "ignore" the file, meaning that it will removed
from dropbox, but just stay on the computer.
Is there a similar way that allows you do basically the opposite -- i.e. remove the file from my computer but retain on dropbox.
This is what happens with "selective sync", that I can choose from the graphic interface, but I prefer a command-line solution.
The same question for selecting "local / Online-only" with smart-sync.
I am guessing that this information is present in the ADS file com.dropbox.attrs, but this appears to be a binary file, so I cannot guess
what the format is.
