About "Tar" function

[eric_204]

I would like to use "Tar" to backup a directoy , but there are many sub-directories under this directory , how can I skip one of directory to be backup ? thx

eg.
# cd /home
# ls
ACC
EDP
ENG
MKT
SAL

how can I use tar to backup all the /home directory , but skip the dirctory "EDP" ? thx.

[Denver Osborn]

This will do it

tar -cvf /dev/rmt/0m `find /home | grep -v /home/EDP`


-Denver

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

In that case I would suggest using pax. You can force pax to create tar files (-x ustar) and get the list of files to put into in from stdin, so your line would become something like this:
find . | grep -v '^EDP' | pax -w -f -x ustar -d

[Mark Grant]

I really like Denver's answer!, I wouldn't have thought of that myself :)

However, I fear that you could end up having the old and irritating "too many arguments" error with the solution proposed. Just to be on the safe side, I would add the "-type d" to the arguments of "find" in Denvers solution, just to reduce the chances of this happening.

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

But that has another problem: you would have directories and its subdirectories both in the output, which is not what you want.

In that case, you could do it like this:
tar cvf `ls | grep -v EDP`

Which gives a lot shorter command line, but still can give the same error with too many arguments.

[Mark Grant]

Yes Elmar, you are correct and your "ls" version does exactly as is required. I would go for that.

GNU "tar" has a "-T filename" option where filename is a file containing the names of the files to backup or restore. If using GNU tar you could just have the names of the directories in there. I remember this was "-F" on SCO "tar" about 100 years ago.

[eric_204]

thx all replies, however , in my real situation , there are many sub-directories that I don't want to backup , could suggest what is the best way ? thx.

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

In that case, create a pattern file and use that with the grep command, depending on what solution you use. If you go for the last one, it should be something like this:
tar cf `ls | grep -v -f `

[Cheryl Griffin]

# find /home/ACC /home/ENG /home/MKT /home/SAL -type f -mtime -1 >/tmp/home.out

# tar -cvf /dev/rmt/0m 'cat /tmp/home.out'

[Denver Osborn]

assuming that you want to archive everything in /home but exclude specific sub directories... use this syntax.

tar cvf /dev/rmt/0m `find /home -type d |grep -v -E '^/home/dir1$|^/home/dir1/subdir2$|^/home/dir3'`


the above will archive all that is in home, /home/dir1/subdir2 and /home/dir3 will not be archived.

To test it out for yourself, run a few find commands piped to grep w/out using tar. What ever is displayed to your screen is what tar would include in the archive.

Hope this helps,
-Denver