recursive tarball

[section31]

hey, does anyone know how to omit a few directories when making a tarball recursively.

Lets say

tar -cvzf backup.tar.gz foo_dir

Yet there are certain directories inside foo_dir I want the tarball to omit. How would I go about doing something like that.

Thanks for your time,
Dave

[greffov]

tar itself can't do it, but I would do it using find. Find can handle regexps.

see man find especially the OPERATORS section.

one example from the manual:
find / \! -name "*.c" -print
Print out a list of all the files whose names do not end in .c.

in complete the command would be something like
tar -cvzf myfile.tar.gz `find . -name "bla" | xargs`

for a backup it might be interesting to use the -j flag instead of the -z flag, since bzip2 compression is much better than gzip compression.

[section31]

Thanks you so much, this is exactly what I needed.

[section31]

hey one more thing greffov. How can I put a regular expression inside the -name paramater. Or is that impossible. If not I can always pipe it into grep but I would like to do something like this but its not working.

find . -name "*\.(html|php)" -print

[greffov]

find . -(i)regex ".+\.(html|php.{0,1})" | xargs

I haven't tried the pattern, you might have to use -E to enable extended regular expression syntax.


b.t.w.: for those that feel very lost when reading this, don't worry -- it's just something you'll never be able to do with any GUI.

[berks]

Originally Posted by greffov

b.t.w.: for those that feel very lost when reading this, don't worry -- it's just something you'll never be able to do with any GUI.

Good because i have no idea what any of that means! Usually when i see that many symbols together they mean someone is cussing!

[section31]

Originally Posted by greffov

find . -(i)regex ".+\.(html|php.{0,1})" | xargs

I haven't tried the pattern, you might have to use -E to enable extended regular expression syntax.


b.t.w.: for those that feel very lost when reading this, don't worry -- it's just something you'll never be able to do with any GUI.

Thanks for all the help... I had a few problems at first, but I found that I needed to escape all metacharacters except these [].*

this worked fine -> -iregex '.*\.\(html\|php\)'

[greffov]

great

can you post up the final complete command to make the tar here, just for reference? (and to make others possibly even more lost ;-) )

b.t.w.: why do you write ".*\.(html|php)" ? Do you have files named .html or .php that you want to be included?

[section31]

About my files being .html or .php. I see where you're going. But since I can't figure out a way to enable "extended regular expression" I was unable to do a +*
I could always substitute a ..* for a +* but that still wouldn't achieve what you want because the results from the find return the relative or absolute paths. So I tried doing something like this [^/] .* but for some reason that doesn't match anything.

Oh well, in the meantime this works nearly perfect.

tar -cvjf backup.tar.bz2 `find . -iregex "..*\.\(html\|php\)"`

Reason i'm doing this is because the only linux box I have access to is my web host, and I'm going use this as a cron job to backup some stuff.

PS:
Cool Linux Reference Site/Book

[tiremonkey2000]

thats what my head felt like after reading this made me cross eyed

[section31]

hey what does that thing below user's avatars do. "Add to reputation" I put something for greffov thinking it would go in his profile or something...but nothing. Where does it go.

[greffov]

I dunno, it adds on my balance or something. You can see it in your control panel.