tar exclude single files/directories, not patterns

tar
Udo G picture Udo G · May 9, 2012 · Viewed 27.8k times · Source

I'm using tar to make daily backups of a server and want to avoid backup of /proc and /sys system directories, but without excluding any directories named "proc" or "sys" somewhere else in the file tree.

For, example having the following directory tree ("bla" being normal files):

# find
.
./sys
./sys/bla
./foo
./foo/sys
./foo/sys/bla

I would like to exclude ./sys but not ./foo/sys.

I can't seem to find an --exclude pattern that does that...

# tar cvf /dev/null * --exclude=sys
foo/

or...

# tar cvf /dev/null * --exclude=/sys
foo/
foo/sys/
foo/sys/bla
sys/
sys/bla

Any ideas? (Linux Debian 6)

Answer

CharlesB picture CharlesB · May 9, 2012

You can specify absolute paths to the exclude pattern, this way other sys or proc directories will be archived:

tar --exclude=/sys --exclude=/proc /

Related questions

Shell command to tar directory excluding certain files/folders

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 …

Read More
How do I tar a directory of files and folders without including the directory itself?

I typically do: tar -czvf my_directory.tar.gz my_directory What if I just want to include everything (including any hidden system files) in my_directory, but not the directory itself? I don't want: my_directory --- my_file …

Read More
How to uncompress a tar.gz in another directory

I have an archive *.tar.gz How can I uncompress this in a destination directory?

Read More