How to exclude directories with TAR on OSX?

Question

This is my current directory structure on my MacOSX-Machine:

kuli at fumpenwuppich in /volume/workspace on master [!?$]
$ ls -l
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   4 kuli  staff  136 Nov 28 16:02 conf
drwxr-xr-x   3 kuli  staff  102 Nov 28 16:23 html
drwxr-xr-x   3 kuli  staff  102 Nov 28 13:06 legacy
drwxr-xr-x  11 kuli  staff  374 Nov 28 15:41 vagrant.nginx

I want to create a tar.bz2-file as a backup, but without the sub directory 'legacy'.

I've tried multiple things:

tar cfjv --exclude 'legacy' ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 .
tar cfjv --exclude='legacy' ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude legacy .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude=legacy .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude='legacy' .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude './legacy' .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude='./legacy' .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude 'workspace/legacy' .

and so on. I've also tried to put the exlude-switch at the end of the command.

But nothing worked. All commands ignore the exclude command at all.

How to achieve this?

Answer 1

According to man page options go before files and directories list:

tar {-c} [options] [files | directories]

Additionally -f and --exclude options require parameters: -f file and --exclude pattern.

So, in your case, this should work:

tar cjv --exclude 'legacy' -f ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 .