Bash scripting rsync: rsync: link_stat (blah) failed: No such file or directory (2)

Check that your \ characters have no whitespace after them at the end of the line. This will cause BASH to not interpret the line wrap correctly, giving the rsync error above.

Remove the '*' from the source location, rsync knows to look in the inside of the directory if you specify the '/' in the end

like that:

rsync --verbose  --progress --stats --compress --rsh=ssh --recursive --times --perms --links --delete --exclude "*bak" --exclude "*~" /repository/ $DEV_SERVER:$REMOTE_DIR