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You can use --exclude multiples times. Note that the dir thefoldertoexclude after --exclude option is relative to the sourcefolder , i.e., sourcefolder/thefoldertoexclude . Also you can add -n for dry run to see what will be copied before performing real operation, and if everything is ok, remove -n from command line.
We can also use cp command to copy folders from one location to another excluding specific directories. Go your source directory i.e ostechnix in our case. The above command will copy all contents of the current folder ostechnix except the sub-directory dir2 and saves them to /home/sk/backup/ directory.
To exclude multiple directories, OR them between parentheses. And, to exclude directories with a specific name at any level, use the -name primary instead of -path .
Using cp In this case, we get a list of files & folders to be copied using ls command, and use grep command to exclude files & folders. We pass this list to cp command for copying. Here exclusion is done by grep command and not cp command.
Use rsync:
rsync -av --exclude='path1/to/exclude' --exclude='path2/to/exclude' source destination
Note that using source and source/ are different. A trailing slash means to copy the contents of the folder source into destination. Without the trailing slash, it means copy the folder source into destination.
Alternatively, if you have lots of directories (or files) to exclude, you can use --exclude-from=FILE, where FILE is the name of a file containing files or directories to exclude.
--exclude may also contain wildcards, such as --exclude=*/.svn*
Use tar along with a pipe.
cd /source_directory
tar cf - --exclude=dir_to_exclude . | (cd /destination && tar xvf - )
You can even use this technique across ssh.
You can use find with the -prune option.
An example from man find:
cd /source-dir
find . -name .snapshot -prune -o \( \! -name *~ -print0 \)|
cpio -pmd0 /dest-dir
This command copies the contents of /source-dir to /dest-dir, but omits
files and directories named .snapshot (and anything in them). It also
omits files or directories whose name ends in ~, but not their con‐
tents. The construct -prune -o \( ... -print0 \) is quite common. The
idea here is that the expression before -prune matches things which are
to be pruned. However, the -prune action itself returns true, so the
following -o ensures that the right hand side is evaluated only for
those directories which didn't get pruned (the contents of the pruned
directories are not even visited, so their contents are irrelevant).
The expression on the right hand side of the -o is in parentheses only
for clarity. It emphasises that the -print0 action takes place only
for things that didn't have -prune applied to them. Because the
default `and' condition between tests binds more tightly than -o, this
is the default anyway, but the parentheses help to show what is going
on.
you can use tar, with --exclude option , and then untar it in destination. eg
cd /source_directory
tar cvf test.tar --exclude=dir_to_exclude *
mv test.tar /destination
cd /destination
tar xvf test.tar
see the man page of tar for more info
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