rsync: filenames with spaces, quotes and japanese letters

Question

I'm writing a script for syncing completed torrents from a remote server and remembering already synced files/folders. But filenames with quotes or japanese letters are causing some trouble, so rsync have to run two times at the moment.

rsync -aP ovh:"$src/$(printf "%q" "$1")" "$dst/"

working:

• brackets
• whitespaces
• quotes

not working:

• japanese letters

Every single japanese letter will be converted to something like ?\#211, \#215島 or \#227?\. Since I'm using OS X, I also tried --iconv=utf-8-mac,utf-8 - without success.

rsync -aP ovh:"'$src/${1/\'/\\'}'" "$dst/"

working:

• brackets
• whitespaces
• japanese letters

not working:

• quotes

For example $1 is test's file, the string send to the server becomes "'/data/rtorrent/complete/test\'s file'"
Error message: zsh:1: unmatched '

Seems like escaping within a single quoted text doesn't work. But if the outer single quotes are removed, rsync interprets a whitespace as separator for another file.

I thought maybe it would help to convert every single character to unicode (like \u1337) and send this string to the server, but didn't find a way to do that. Just endless scripts for the other way around.

Also sed wasn't helpful either - way too much work to escape everything manually. This script should work reliable and I don't want to check every now and then if I covered every possibility which maybe needs escaping.

Any idea how to merge the two commands into one?

Edit: my temporary solution was this:

sync() {
  # 1. escape quotes / 2. escape kana
  rsync -aP ovh:"$src/$(printf "%q" "$1")" "$dst/" >& /dev/null && success "$1" || \
 (rsync -aP ovh:"'$src/${1/\'/\\'}'" "$dst/"       >& /dev/null && success "$1" || unlock "$1")
}

Answer 1

Finally got it working. Now it can handle strings like test"!'試みる.ext. I'm using ssh and tar now, but should also work with rsync.

sync {
  item=${1//\"/\\\"}
  ssh -n -c arcfour $server tar -C \"$remotedir\" -c -- \"$item\" | tar x 2>/dev/null
}