Exclude directory while making tar

tar command basically used on Linux to compress/uncompress  any folder. Normally if we want to make a tar of whole folder then we can use follow steps

1. open Linux shell or do ssh with root access
2. go to directory which you want to compress
3. run your tar command

Example

[root@www ~]# cd /home/myfolder/
[root@www myfolder]# tar -cvf my_tar_file_name.tar *

it will make a tar file with the name my_tar_file_name.tar which contain all files and folders in “myfolder” directory.

Now suppose your “myfolder” have list something like as below

test

test1

test_file.php

index.php

And you want to exclude test1 folder at the item on compression then you can do by following command

[root@www myfolder]# tar -cvf my_tar_file_name.tar * --exclude test1

 Note: Don’t use slash / , otherwise it will not exclude that folder

like below is wrong format

[root@www myfolder]# tar -cvf my_tar_file_name.tar * --exclude test1/

you can exclude multiple folder also, something like

[root@www myfolder]# tar -cvf my_tar_file_name.tar * --exclude test1 --exclude test

More example like:-

tar -pczf MyBackup.tar.gz /home/user/public_html/ --exclude "/home/user/public_html/tmp" 
tar --exclude='file1' --exclude='patter*' --exclude='file2'

For more help you can visit http://www.centos.org/docs/2/rhl-gsg-en-7.2/s1-zip-tar.html

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Rajeev Achra

I am a software engineer who specializes in Internet applications. I have worked with a wide variety of technologies and programming languages to open source LAMP environments. I have more than 6 years of object-oriented programming experience and am highly proficient in ActionScript, PHP, MYSQL, JavaScript, Jquery and a multitude of other technologies used in modern web applications.

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