tar or not to tar that is the question

[Adam Noble]

OK people I have a quick tar query. I want to tar up the entire home directory apart from one subdirectory which has some rather large files within it. Is there a flag within tar to let me do this or am I better using some other utility such as cpio.

[Jeff_Traigle]

There's no exclude option for tar (at least not HP's version) although you could probably play around with regular expressions for shell file name expansion to accomplish it. I don't know about cpio, but, if you use HP's fbackup(1M) utility, it allows for exclusions. The only downside to fbackup is that it's proprietary so the archive is not portable to other OSes.

[Peter Godron]

Adam,
temporarily change the permisssions on the subdirectory so tar can not back it up.
Then run your tar.
Then reset the permissions.

[Ralph Grothe]

You could install GNU tar which I think knows the --exclude option.
Alternatively you could use HP's fbackup which has the -e option,
or you could do it the die-hard way with find and -prune (which involves some quoted bracketing) and pipe into cpio.

[Coolmar]

This should work:

cd /home (whatever your home dir is)

tar cvf tarfile.tar `ls | grep -v exclude-dir-name`

[Peter Nikitka · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Coolmar's solution works only for toplevel dirs to exclude. A find/cpio solution can exclude directories at lower levels as well.
The following example excludes directories 'tmp' and 'debug':

cd
find . \( -name tmp -o -name debug \) -prune -o type f -print | cpio -pdv /backup/home.cpio

mfG Peter