Answer by Thomas for rsync to remote directory

For rsync the -p option means to preserve permissions and does not take an argument. Therefore your command cannot be parsed correctly and you get an error.

If you want to change the SSH port on which rsync should connect, use the command as follows.

rsync -avru --exclude-from='/home/me/exclude-me.txt' -e 'ssh -p 2222' \ /home/me/ \assistant@assistant.local:/home/assistant/