Excluding directory when creating a .tar.gz file

linux gzip tar compression
suresh picture suresh · Nov 27, 2010 · Viewed 209.5k times · Source

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

Victor Parmar picture Victor Parmar · Nov 27, 2010

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"

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