rsync: colon in file names

Other than by renaming the files first, how can I rsync files that may have colons in their names?

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Method 1

Colons are only special in the first directory component of a command line argument. So if you have what looks like a relative path, prepend ./.

$ mkdir sou:rce
$ rsync -a sou:rce/ de:st/
The source and destination cannot both be remote.
$ rsync -av ./sou:rce/ ./de:st/
sending incremental file list
created directory ./de:st
./

In a script:

case $source in
  /*) :;;
  *) source=./$source;;
esac
case $dest in
  /*) :;;
  *) dest=./$dest;;
esac
rsync "$source" "$dest"

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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