In case anyone ever references this post here is the command I used: rsync -avz --progress --exclude-from=exclude username@some.location.com:/files/to/copy

In case anyone ever references this post here is the command I used: rsync -avz --progress --exclude-from=exclude username@some.location.com:/files/to/copy/ /place/to/put/them/ The exclude file is a plain list of several items to be ignored and they are just listed by name 1 per line. If you want to do a "dry run" on what will happen add a -n to the arguments ( -navz instead of -avz).