Selective TAR Backup

[Greg Stark_1]

I have a directory I want to dump to tape called /opt/sai. There are multiple files and directories in it. I want everything in it backed up except a directory calle .snapshot.

Any way to accomplish this with tar?

[Hoefnix]

Hi,

You can use the -X option of tar to exclude files.

At the moment I am using Linux at home, so can't check if this is also in HP-UX.

HTH,

Peter

[Tanmay_1 · Accepted solution]

Greg,

Do the following.
cd /opt/sai
ls > file_list
vi file_list
(remove the directory you want to remove)
go to the last of first line and press j. And keep on doing it, till all lines are converted in a single line.
Go to the begning of first line and type tar command like, tar cvf /dev/rmt/0m .
Save the file
Run it. #sh ./file_list

[Rick Garland]

Here is an option

From the directory you want to backup (minus the .snapshot directory)

tar -cvf yourname.tar `ls | grep -v .snapshot`

Notice the backticks, not single quotes.

[Jeff_Traigle]

No option on HP's tar to do this.

The solutions mentioned already give you relative backup of the directory and will only eliminate .snapshot in that particular directory, not in any subdirectories that might exist.

Not as simple as it looks for a general case situation. Would be easier with fbackup. Any reason you need to use tar (i.e. portability to other UNIX variants or between older and newer revisions of HP-UX)?

[Jeff_Traigle]

And actually, even if the previous solutions would work in your case, don't just do "ls" do "ls -1". With just ls, you get multi-column output by default and you'll end up grepping out .snapshot and whatever happens to show up in the same line of output. "ls -1" will force it single column output and grap will eliminate only what you really want it to.

[Sundar_7]

How about this?

# cd /opt/sai
# tar -cvf SAI.tar $(find . | egrep -v "^./.snapshot|^\.$")

[Jeff_Traigle]

I thought of using find similarly, Sundar... the problem is that find lists the directories as well as the files... which means you're making redundant copies of files in your archive and still picking up the .snapshot directories along the way as a result... exactly what Greg's trying to avoid. You can't just exclude directories from find either because, if a directory is empty, it won't be picked up to go into the archive.

[Greg Stark_1]

Thanks everyone, I created a tar.sh with the ls output on one line and that seemed to work great.