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

You can also use one of the "--exclude-tag" options depending on your needs:

• --exclude-tag=FILE
• --exclude-tag-all=FILE
• --exclude-tag-under=FILE

The folder hosting the specified FILE will be excluded.

Answer 2

gnu tar v 1.26 the --exclude needs to come after archive file and backup directory arguments, should have no leading or trailing slashes, and prefers no quotes (single or double). So relative to the PARENT directory to be backed up, it's:

tar cvfz /path_to/mytar.tgz ./dir_to_backup --exclude=some_path/to_exclude

Answer 3

tar -cvzf destination_folder source_folder -X /home/folder/excludes.txt

-X indicates a file which contains a list of filenames which must be excluded from the backup. For Instance, you can specify *~ in this file to not include any filenames ending with ~ in the backup.

Answer 4

I had no luck getting tar to exclude a 5 Gigabyte subdirectory a few levels deep. In the end, I just used the unix Zip command. It worked a lot easier for me.

So for this particular example from the original post
(tar --exclude='./folder' --exclude='./upload/folder2' -zcvf /backup/filename.tgz . )

The equivalent would be:

zip -r /backup/filename.zip . -x upload/folder/**\* upload/folder2/**\*

(NOTE: Here is the post I originally used that helped me https://superuser.com/questions/312301/unix-zip-directory-but-excluded-specific-subdirectories-and-everything-within-t)

Answer 5

I found this somewhere else so I won't take credit, but it worked better than any of the solutions above for my mac specific issues (even though this is closed):

tar zc --exclude __MACOSX --exclude .DS_Store -f <archive> <source(s)>