Shell command to tar directory excluding certain f

Question

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: cma'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 .

Answer 1

The following bash script should do the trick. It uses the answer given here by Marcus Sundman.

#!/bin/bash

echo -n "Please enter the name of the tar file you wish to create with out extension "
read nam

echo -n "Please enter the path to the directories to tar "
read pathin

echo tar -czvf $nam.tar.gz
excludes=`find $pathin -iname "*.CC" -exec echo "--exclude \'{}\'" \;|xargs`
echo $pathin

echo tar -czvf $nam.tar.gz $excludes $pathin

This will print out the command you need and you can just copy and paste it back in. There is probably a more elegant way to provide it directly to the command line.

Just change *.CC for any other common extension, file name or regex you want to exclude and this should still work.

EDIT

Just to add a little explanation; find generates a list of files matching the chosen regex (in this case *.CC). This list is passed via xargs to the echo command. This prints --exclude 'one entry from the list'. The slashes () are escape characters for the ' marks.

Answer 2

old question with many answers, but I found that none were quite clear enough for me, so I would like to add my try.

if you have the following structure

/home/ftp/mysite/

with following file/folders

/home/ftp/mysite/file1
/home/ftp/mysite/file2
/home/ftp/mysite/file3
/home/ftp/mysite/folder1
/home/ftp/mysite/folder2
/home/ftp/mysite/folder3

so, you want to make a tar file that contain everyting inside /home/ftp/mysite (to move the site to a new server), but file3 is just junk, and everything in folder3 is also not needed, so we will skip those two.

we use the format

tar -czvf <name of tar file> <what to tar> <any excludes>

where the c = create, z = zip, and v = verbose (you can see the files as they are entered, usefull to make sure none of the files you exclude are being added). and f= file.

so, my command would look like this

cd /home/ftp/
tar -czvf mysite.tar.gz mysite --exclude='file3' --exclude='folder3'

note the files/folders excluded are relatively to the root of your tar (I have tried full path here relative to / but I can not make that work).

hope this will help someone (and me next time I google it)

Answer 3

For Mac OSX I had to do

tar -zcv --exclude='folder' -f theOutputTarFile.tar folderToTar

Note the -f after the --exclude=

Answer 4

I've experienced that, at least with the Cygwin version of tar I'm using ("CYGWIN_NT-5.1 1.7.17(0.262/5/3) 2012-10-19 14:39 i686 Cygwin" on a Windows XP Home Edition SP3 machine), the order of options is important.

While this construction worked for me:

tar cfvz target.tgz --exclude='<dir1>' --exclude='<dir2>' target_dir

that one didn't work:

tar cfvz --exclude='<dir1>' --exclude='<dir2>' target.tgz target_dir

This, while tar --help reveals the following:

tar [OPTION...] [FILE]

So, the second command should also work, but apparently it doesn't seem to be the case...

Best rgds,

Answer 5

This exclude pattern handles filename suffix like png or mp3 as well as directory names like .git and node_modules

tar --exclude={*.png,*.mp3,*.wav,.git,node_modules} -Jcf ${target_tarball}  ${source_dirname}

Answer 6

For those who have issues with it, some versions of tar would only work properly without the './' in the exclude value.

Tar --version

tar (GNU tar) 1.27.1

Command syntax that work:

tar -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz * --exclude=acme/foo

These will not work:

$ tar -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz * --exclude=./acme/foo
$ tar -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz * --exclude='./acme/foo'
$ tar --exclude=./acme/foo -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz *
$ tar --exclude='./acme/foo' -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz *
$ tar -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz * --exclude=/full/path/acme/foo
$ tar -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz * --exclude='/full/path/acme/foo'
$ tar --exclude=/full/path/acme/foo -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz *
$ tar --exclude='/full/path/acme/foo' -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz *