rsync –skip-compress=LIST option

On Ubuntu 12.04, rsync has the --skip-compress=LIST option, which is fricken’ rad since it defaults to skipping files with the extensions 7z, avi, bz2, deb, gz, iso, jpeg, jpg, mov, mp3, mp4 ogg, rpm, tbz, tgz, z and zip.

So before, when we used to agonize over whether to use the -z option if the transfer might include some already-compressed files (or at least I would have agonized over it), now we can now rest easy knowing that rsync won’t try to compress at least some of them by default, and that we can override the defaults when needed by using something like this syntax: --skip-compress=gz/jpg/mp[34]/7z/bz2.