[SOLVED] Unknown shorthand flag: 'â' in --exclude

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1

I’m trying to to run a restic backup on some music files on my Debian Server. The command I’m using is:

restic -r “/backups/restic-repo” --verbose backup “/NAS/” -–exclude=“/NAS/Media/MUSIC” –-exclude=“/NAS/Media/GAMES”

It always spits out the same error, “unknown shorthand flag: ‘â’ in -–exclude=/NAS/Media/MUSIC/”

As you can see, that character is nowhere to be found in the command. I checked, the apt-get version of restic was very outdated, so I self-updated to the current version, restarted my server, and I’m still getting the same error.

What might be the cause?

2

The first hyphen looking thing in –-exclude=“/NAS/Media/GAMES” isn’t a hyphen.

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3

Thank you! It looks like when I copied the command out of LibreOffice Writer it tried to modify the hyphens for some reason.

Now when I try to execute the command it tells me that the directory /NAS/ doesn’t exist. I suppose that is because it’s a symlink. However, when I follow the exact address to the actual mount location of the drive in question, “/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-84475483-4c80-4f1d-a765-e6918b958631/”, found using the df command, it still says it doesn’t exist…

Any ideas?

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4

Please provide an exact copy of the command you ran and the complete output you get.

5

input:

restic -r “/backups/restic-repo” --verbose backup “/NAS/” --exclude=“/NAS/Media/MUSIC/” --exclude=“/NAS/Media/GAMES/”

output:

“/NAS/” does not exist, skipping
Fatal: all target directories/files do not exist

While in root, input: find . -maxdepth 1 -type l -ls
which output: 3373 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 59 Jul 2 2022 ./NAS -> /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-84475483-4c80-4f1d-a765-e6918b958631/

directly pointing that my /NAS/ folder is a symlink to: /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-84475483-4c80-4f1d-a765-e6918b958631/

When I re-do the entire restic command substituting the real mount location of that drive (/NAS/ is just a direct symlink to the root of the drive in question,):

restic -r “/backups/restic-repo” --verbose backup “/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-84475483-4c80-4f1d-a765-e6918b958631/” --exclude=“/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-84475483-4c80-4f1d-a765-e6918b958631/Media/MUSIC” --exclude=“/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-84475483-4c80-4f1d-a765-e6918b958631/Media/GAMES”

The output is the same thing basically:

“/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-84475483-4c80-4f1d-a765-e6918b958631 does not exist, skip                                                                             ping
Fatal: all target directories/files do not exist
-bash: ”: command not found
6

This is again probably because of your use of non-plain-ASCII characters. I’m guessing you copied the “/NAS/” part from LibreOffice? That would explain the fact that your quotation characters there are not regular ASCII ones (" vs your “ and ”). Unless I’m mistaken (I haven’t tried this), your shell tries to find a path with those funky characters in them, and this of course does not exist.

If you ditch your use of overformatted text I think you’ll have more luck. Try using a plain text editor instead of a rich text editor for things like this, or make sure that it doesn’t replace “plain/basic” characters with funky ones.

All in all, rewrite the entire command from scratch, by hand and using plain/basic (ASCII) characters, instead of copy-pasting it from LibreOffice or similar, and see how that goes :slight_smile:

This too clearly shows that the shell doesn’t like your formatted text.

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7

That was it, thank you!

My actual process was, when I realized that libreoffice was messing with my text, I would first copy it into regular Windows Notepad, where I replaced all the hyphens. I did not realize that the quotes that look curled in fancy text editors are literally different characters, I assumed they were just a different visualization of the same character, so I didn’t change them initially.

Changing them in notepad to regular quotes fixed the issue!

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