CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosbackuparchivetar
kulifumpenwuppich
kulifumpenwuppich

Reputation: 135

How to exclude directories with TAR on OSX?

This is my current directory structure on my MacOSX-Machine:

kuli at fumpenwuppich in /volume/workspace on master [!?$]
$ ls -l
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   4 kuli  staff  136 Nov 28 16:02 conf
drwxr-xr-x   3 kuli  staff  102 Nov 28 16:23 html
drwxr-xr-x   3 kuli  staff  102 Nov 28 13:06 legacy
drwxr-xr-x  11 kuli  staff  374 Nov 28 15:41 vagrant.nginx

I want to create a tar.bz2-file as a backup, but without the sub directory 'legacy'.

I've tried multiple things:

tar cfjv --exclude 'legacy' ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 .
tar cfjv --exclude='legacy' ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude legacy .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude=legacy .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude='legacy' .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude './legacy' .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude='./legacy' .
tar cfjv ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 --exclude 'workspace/legacy' .

and so on. I've also tried to put the exlude-switch at the end of the command.

But nothing worked. All commands ignore the exclude command at all.

How to achieve this?

Upvotes: 13

Views: 10145

Answers (2)

KenGCL
KenGCL

Reputation: 181

Curiously, I could not get this to work on Mac OS X (version 10.11.5) until I rearranged the order of parameters to something like

tar --exclude '/subdir1/' --exclude '/subdir2/' -zcvf "mybackup.tar.gz" ./myfolder

Upvotes: 18

baf
baf

Reputation: 4681

According to man page options go before files and directories list:

tar {-c} [options] [files | directories]

Additionally -f and --exclude options require parameters: -f file and --exclude pattern.

So, in your case, this should work:

tar cjv --exclude 'legacy' -f ~/Dropbox/backup/kuli.20151128.tar.bz2 .

Upvotes: 17

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