Using rsync normally is nice and straightforward. e.g.:

# rsync -av -e 'ssh' /some/local/path user@remote:/some/remote/path

This works fine and prompts for the ssh password to log into the remote machine if required.

But what if the remote end needs root (or a different user) rights to write into the destination directory? Just whack in an --rsync-path option to add sudo to the rsync command, right?:

# rsync -av -e 'ssh' --rsync-path='sudo rsync' /some/local/path user@remote:/some/remote/path
user@remote's password: 
sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(632) [sender=3.0.4]

Oh, that didn’t work — sudo couldn’t ask us for a password. Adding the -t option to the ssh used by rsync doesn’t work either, as it can’t allocate a tty:

# rsync -av -e 'ssh -t' --rsync-path='sudo rsync' /some/local/path user@remote:/some/remote/path
Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.
user@remote's password:

So we need to tell sudo to ask for the password some other way. Fortunately there is a -A option for sudo which tells it to use an “askpass” program, but we also need to tell it what askpass program to use (and it’s not in the default path on most machines). We can find this with locate askpass on the remote machine:

[user@remote]$ locate askpass
/etc/profile.d/gnome-ssh-askpass.csh
/etc/profile.d/gnome-ssh-askpass.sh
/usr/libexec/openssh/gnome-ssh-askpass
/usr/libexec/openssh/ssh-askpass

We’ll use /usr/libexec/openssh/ssh-askpass as that should pick an appropriate version according to what is available to sudo. Again sudo won’t have a tty to ask for the password on, so how about we use an X11 askpass program and enable X forwarding for ssh:

# rsync -av -e 'ssh -X' --rsync-path='SUDO_ASKPASS=/usr/libexec/openssh/ssh-askpass sudo -A rsync' /some/local/path user@remote:/some/remote/path
user@remote's password: [type user password]
[Then a dialog pops up for the sudo password]

Hooray, this works! Bit of a faff but it could be scripted or made into a shell function to save having to remember it 🙂

Yes, you could enable remote root login, but it would definitely be preferable to avoid that.