6.4 Excluding Some Files

To avoid operating on files whose names match a particular pattern, use the --exclude or --exclude-from options.

--exclude=pattern

Causes tar to ignore files that match the pattern.

The --exclude=pattern option prevents any file or member whose name matches the shell wildcard (pattern) from being operated on. For example, to create an archive with all the contents of the directory src except for files whose names end in .o, use the command ‘tar -cf src.tar --exclude='*.o' src’.

You may give multiple --exclude options.

--exclude-from=file

-X file

Causes tar to ignore files that match the patterns listed in file.

Use the --exclude-from option to read a list of patterns, one per line, from file; tar will ignore files matching those patterns. Thus if tar is called as ‘tar -c -X foo .’ and the file foo contains a single line *.o, no files whose names end in .o will be added to the archive.

Notice, that lines from file are read verbatim. One of the frequent errors is leaving some extra whitespace after a file name, which is difficult to catch using text editors.

However, empty lines are OK.

--exclude-vcs

Exclude files and directories used by following version control systems: ‘CVS’, ‘RCS’, ‘SCCS’, ‘SVN’, ‘Arch’, ‘Bazaar’, ‘Mercurial’, and ‘Darcs’.

As of version 1.26, the following files are excluded:

• CVS/, and everything under it
• RCS/, and everything under it
• SCCS/, and everything under it
• .git/, and everything under it
• .gitignore
• .cvsignore
• .svn/, and everything under it
• .arch-ids/, and everything under it
• {arch}/, and everything under it
• =RELEASE-ID
• =meta-update
• =update
• .bzr
• .bzrignore
• .bzrtags
• .hg
• .hgignore
• .hgrags
• _darcs

--exclude-backups

Exclude backup and lock files. This option causes exclusion of files that match the following shell globbing patterns:

.#*

*~

#*#

When creating an archive, the --exclude-caches option family causes tar to exclude all directories that contain a cache directory tag. A cache directory tag is a short file with the well-known name CACHEDIR.TAG and having a standard header specified in http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/spec.html. Various applications write cache directory tags into directories they use to hold regenerable, non-precious data, so that such data can be more easily excluded from backups.

There are three ‘exclude-caches’ options, each providing a different exclusion semantics:

--exclude-caches

Do not archive the contents of the directory, but archive the directory itself and the CACHEDIR.TAG file.

--exclude-caches-under

Do not archive the contents of the directory, nor the CACHEDIR.TAG file, archive only the directory itself.

--exclude-caches-all

Omit directories containing CACHEDIR.TAG file entirely.

Another option family, --exclude-tag, provides a generalization of this concept. It takes a single argument, a file name to look for. Any directory that contains this file will be excluded from the dump. Similarly to ‘exclude-caches’, there are three options in this option family:

--exclude-tag=file

Do not dump the contents of the directory, but dump the directory itself and the file.

--exclude-tag-under=file

Do not dump the contents of the directory, nor the file, archive only the directory itself.

--exclude-tag-all=file

Omit directories containing file file entirely.

Multiple --exclude-tag* options can be given.

For example, given this directory:

     $ find dir
     dir
     dir/blues
     dir/jazz
     dir/folk
     dir/folk/tagfile
     dir/folk/sanjuan
     dir/folk/trote

The --exclude-tag will produce the following:

     $ tar -cf archive.tar --exclude-tag=tagfile -v dir
     dir/
     dir/blues
     dir/jazz
     dir/folk/
     tar: dir/folk/: contains a cache directory tag tagfile;
       contents not dumped
     dir/folk/tagfile

Both the dir/folk directory and its tagfile are preserved in the archive, however the rest of files in this directory are not.

Now, using the --exclude-tag-under option will exclude tagfile from the dump, while still preserving the directory itself, as shown in this example:

     $ tar -cf archive.tar --exclude-tag-under=tagfile -v dir
     dir/
     dir/blues
     dir/jazz
     dir/folk/
     ./tar: dir/folk/: contains a cache directory tag tagfile;
       contents not dumped

Finally, using --exclude-tag-all omits the dir/folk directory entirely:

     $ tar -cf archive.tar --exclude-tag-all=tagfile -v dir
     dir/
     dir/blues
     dir/jazz
     ./tar: dir/folk/: contains a cache directory tag tagfile;
       directory not dumped

• problems with exclude