Both drush and rsync are handy tools to automate the deployment of Drupal sites. You just have to be careful how you combine them.

In my development environment I have a local CVS checkout of drush and I use rsync to push that directory to the remote production server. This way I'm sure both development and production use the same version of drush without the need to install a CVS client on the production server.

Unfortunately my initial attempts to get drush running on the remote system always resulted in the following error message:

The command 'drush.php help' could not be found.

Initially I assumed there was something wrong with the path to the drush executable or the code that detects the location of the drush.php file but only after a while I found the real culprit.

To reduce the number of files that need to be synced I used rsync's --cvs-exclude option. This option makes rsync ignore certain files and directories in the same way CVS does. For example it will filter out all CVS directories. It turns out that a lot more files get excluded:

RCS SCCS CVS CVS.adm RCSLOG cvslog.* tags TAGS .make.state .nse_depinfo *~ #* .#* ,* _$* *$ *.old *.bak *.BAK *.orig *.rej .del-* *.a *.olb *.o *.obj *.so *.exe *.Z *.elc *.ln core .svn/ .git/ .bzr/

Notice core in that list? Guess in which directory drush keeps major parts of its code! By using the --cvs-exclude option of rsync, my remote drush directory was missing approximately 2500 lines of PHP code resulting in the bizarre error message.

The solution is to stop using the --cvs-exclude option or use the --filter option to tune the list of files to exclude during syncing.