Rsync seems incompatible with .bashrc (causes "is your shell clean?")

It turns out rsync can't work with a remote server which has a .bashrc file?

At local client i got when run rsync:

protocol version mismatch -- is your shell clean?
(see the rsync man page for an explanation)
rsync error: protocol incompatibility (code 2) at compat.c(180) [sender=3.0.7]

As suggested here removing the .bashrc on server solved the problem. How to solve it without removing the .bashrc file (temporarily)?

You can run into problems if the .bashrc on the remote server outputs anything to the terminal. Rsync may not expect that and may have problems as a result.

You can fix this by removing any commands in the .bashrc that output text, or by piping any output to /dev/null.

The .bashrc is really not the correct place for generating output, as it causes this kind of problem. A lot of people get away with it, though, until they try to run rsync :-)

Any desired output (and the associated logic and commands) should be moved to your .bash_profile (see, e.g., Server Fault question ".profile vs. .bash_profile vs. .bashrc" for further discussion on the differences between the files).

That way, you won't need to sacrifice getting the output when you login, nor deal with making temporary changes to your .bashrc when you want to use rsync.

I've always had .bashrc files on my user accounts and never had this problem until I tried today to rsync something to my server using the root account. Your post helped me find the solution:

my $user/.bashrc files always start with the following section to prevent this kind of issue. I replicated it to root's .bashrc and rsync'ing now works like a charm!

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
case $- in
    *i*) ;;
      *) return;;
esac

HTH, karsten