tar exclude file pattern

Question

I am trying to create a tar with follwing command:

tar -cvf myFile.tar -X exclude-files.txt myContentDirectory

and my exclude-file has follwing patterns to exclude:

**/*.bak
**/*.db
**/*.html

But i dont see these file types being excluded out in my tar. What am I doing wrong here?

I found that when i have just one pattern in my exclude-files.txt, lets say only

**/*.bak

it does work. But not with multiple file patterns (EACH ON NEW LINE)

Answer 1

I think this:

*.bak
*.db
*.html

is the correct format for the exclude file if you want to exclude a particular directory you could do:

some-dir/*.db

Also your command should look like this:

tar -cvf myFile.tar -X exclude-files.txt myContentDirectory 

Answer 2

Sorry if this answer is a little late.

tar -cO --exclude=*.bak myContentDirectory | tar -O --delete '*.db' | tar -O --delete '*.html' > myFile.tar

See, what you're doing here is creating the tar, but sending it to stdout instead of to a file then piping that into tar to delete the stuff you don't want, one or more times and finally writing the output to a file.

You can even test it first like this:

tar -cO --exclude=*.bak myContentDirectory | tar -O --delete '*.db' | tar -O --delete '*.html' | tar -tv

Which will spit out a list of all the files remaining in the archive.