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I want to copy all files in a directory except some files in a specific sub-directory. I have noticed that cp command didn't have the --exclude option. So, how can I achieve this?
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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 .
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.
We can exclude directories by using the help of “path“, “prune“, “o” and “print” switches with find command. The directory “bit” will be excluded from the find search!
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.
rsync is fast and easy:
rsync -av --progress sourcefolder /destinationfolder --exclude thefoldertoexclude You can use --exclude multiples times.
rsync -av --progress sourcefolder /destinationfolder --exclude thefoldertoexclude --exclude anotherfoldertoexclude 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.
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Well, if exclusion of certain filename patterns had to be performed by every unix-ish file utility (like cp, mv, rm, tar, rsync, scp, ...), an immense duplication of effort would occur. Instead, such things can be done as part of globbing, i.e. by your shell.
man 1 bash, / extglob.
Example:
$ shopt -s extglob $ echo images/* images/004.bmp images/033.jpg images/1276338351183.jpg images/2252.png $ echo images/!(*.jpg) images/004.bmp images/2252.png
So you just put a pattern inside !(), and it negates the match. The pattern can be arbitrarily complex, starting from enumeration of individual paths (as Vanwaril shows in another answer): !(filename1|path2|etc3), to regex-like things with stars and character classes. Refer to the manpage for details.
man 1 zshexpn, / filename generation.
You can do setopt KSH_GLOB and use bash-like patterns. Or,
% setopt EXTENDED_GLOB % echo images/* images/004.bmp images/033.jpg images/1276338351183.jpg images/2252.png % echo images/*~*.jpg images/004.bmp images/2252.png
So x~y matches pattern x, but excludes pattern y. Once again, for full details refer to manpage.
The fish shell has a much prettier answer to this:
🐟 cp (string match -v '*.excluded.names' -- srcdir/*) destdir
Type cp *, hit CtrlX* and just see what happens. it's not harmful I promise
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