Excluding directory when creating a .tar.gz file

Question

I have a /public_html/ folder, in that folder there's a /tmp/ folder that has like 70gb of files I don't really need.

Now I am trying to create a .tar.gz of /public_html/ excluding /tmp/

This is the command I ran:

tar -pczf MyBackup.tar.gz /home/user/public_html/ --exclude "/home/user/public_html/tmp/" 

The tar is still being created, and by doing an ls -sh I can see that MyBackup.tar.gz already has about 30gb, and I know for sure that /public_html/ without /tmp/ doesn't have more than 1GB of files.

What did I do wrong?

Answer 1

The exclude option needs to include the = sign and " are not required.

--exclude=/home/user/public_html/tmp

Answer 2

Try moving the --exclude to before the include.

tar -pczf MyBackup.tar.gz --exclude "/home/user/public_html/tmp/" /home/user/public_html/ 

Answer 3

Yes, remove the trailing / and (at least in ubuntu 11.04) all the paths given must be relative or full path. You can't mix absolute and relative paths in the same command.

sudo tar -czvf 2011.10.24.tar.gz ./start-directory --exclude "home/user/start-directory/logs"

will not exclude logs directory but

sudo tar -czvf 2011.10.24.tar.gz ./start-directory --exclude "./start-directory/logs"

will work

Answer 4

Try removing the last / at the end of the directory path to exclude

tar -pczf MyBackup.tar.gz /home/user/public_html/ --exclude "/home/user/public_html/tmp" 

Answer 5

You can also exclude more than one using only one --exclude. Like this example:

tar -pczf MyBackup.tar.gz --exclude={"/home/user/public_html/tmp","/home/user/public_html/data"} /home/user/public_html/

In --exclude= you must finish the directory name without / and must in between MyBackup.tar.gz and /home/user/public_html/

The syntax is:

tar <OPTIONS> <TARBALL_WILL_CREATE> <ARGS> <PATH_TO_COMPRESS>

Answer 6

This worked for me:

tar -zcvf target.tar.gz target/ --exclude="target/backups" --exclude="target/cache"