Copy folder recursively, excluding some folders

bash unix shell scripting
trobrock picture trobrock · Feb 3, 2010 · Viewed 136.7k times · Source

I am trying to write a simple bash script that will copy the entire contents of a folder including hidden files and folders into another folder, but I want to exclude certain specific folders. How could I achieve this?

Answer

Kaleb Pederson picture Kaleb Pederson · Feb 3, 2010

Use rsync:

rsync -av --exclude='path1/to/exclude' --exclude='path2/to/exclude' source destination

Note that using source and source/ are different. A trailing slash means to copy the contents of the folder source into destination. Without the trailing slash, it means copy the folder source into destination.

Alternatively, if you have lots of directories (or files) to exclude, you can use --exclude-from=FILE, where FILE is the name of a file containing files or directories to exclude.

--exclude may also contain wildcards, such as --exclude=*/.svn*

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