Is there a simple shell command/script that supports excluding certain files/folders from being archived?
I have a directory that need to be archived with a sub directory that has a number of very large files I do not need to backup.
Not quite solutions:
The tar --exclude=PATTERN
command matches the given pattern and excludes those files, but I need specific files & folders to be ignored (full file path), otherwise valid files might be excluded.
I could also use the find command to create a list of files and exclude the ones I don't want to archive and pass the list to tar, but that only works with for a small amount of files. I have tens of thousands.
I'm beginning to think the only solution is to create a file with a list of files/folders to be excluded, then use rsync with --exclude-from=file
to copy all the files to a tmp directory, and then use tar to archive that directory.
Can anybody think of a better/more efficient solution?
EDIT: Charles Ma's solution works well. The big gotcha is that the --exclude='./folder'
MUST be at the beginning of the tar command. Full command (cd first, so backup is relative to that directory):
cd /folder_to_backup tar --exclude='./folder' --exclude='./upload/folder2' -zcvf /backup/filename.tgz .
You can exclude directories with --exclude for tar. To clarify, you can use full path for --exclude. Beware that --exclude=dir/ignore_this_dir will match in any subtree as well! You'll end up missing files you didn't expect to be excluded.
The ' --exclude= pattern ' option prevents any file or member whose name matches the shell wildcard ( pattern ) from being operated on. For example, to create an archive with all the contents of the directory 'src' except for files whose names end in '.o', use the command ' tar -cf src. tar --exclude='*.o' src '.
You can have multiple exclude options for tar so
$ tar --exclude='./folder' --exclude='./upload/folder2' -zcvf /backup/filename.tgz .
etc will work. Make sure to put --exclude
before the source and destination items.
You can exclude directories with --exclude
for tar.
If you want to archive everything except /usr
you can use:
tar -zcvf /all.tgz / --exclude=/usr
In your case perhaps something like
tar -zcvf archive.tgz arc_dir --exclude=dir/ignore_this_dir
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