tar/gzip excluding certain files - linux

I have a directory with many sub-directories. In some of those sub-directories I have files with *.asc extension and some with *.xdr.
I want to create a SINGLE tarball/gzip file which maintains the directory structure but excludes all files with the *.xdr extension.
How can I do this?
I did something like find . -depth -name *.asc -exec gzip -r9 {} + but this gzips every *.asc file individually which is not what I want to do.

You need to use the --exclude option:
tar -zc -f test.tar.gz --exclude='*.xdr' *

gzip will always handle files individually. If you want a bundled archive you will have to tar the files first and then gzip the result, hence you will end up with a .tar.gz file or .tgz for short.
To get a better control over what you are doing, you can first find the files using the command you already posted (with -print instead of the gzip command) and put them into a file, then use this file (=filelist.txt) to instruct tar with what to archive
tar -T filelist.txt -c -v -f myarchive.tar

Related

Decompress .gz files from subfolders (recursively) into root folder

Here is the situation : I have a folder, containing a lot of subfolders, some of them containing .gz compressed files (NOT tar, just compressed text files). I want to recursively decompress all these .gz files into the root folder, but I can't figure out the exact way to do it.
I have my folders like that :
/folderX/subfolder1/file.gz
by using
gzip -c -d -r *.gz
I can probably extract all the files at once, but they will remain in their respective subfolders. I want them all in /folderX/
find -name *.gz
gives me the correct list of the files I am looking for, but I have no idea how to combine the 2 commands. Should I combine these commands in a script ? Or is there a functionality of gzip that I have missed allowing to decompress everything in the folder from which you are executing the command ?
Thanks for the help !
You can use a while..done loop that iterate the input:
find dirname -name *.gz|while read i; do gzip -c -d -r $i; done
You can also use xargs, with the additional benefit of dealing with spaces (" ") in the file name of parameter -0:
find dirname -name '*.gz' -print0 | xargs -0 -L 1 gzip -c -d -r
The "-print0" output all the files found separated by NULL character. The -0 switch of xargs rebuild the list parsing the NULL character and applies the "gzip..." command to each of them. Pay attention to the "-L 1" parameter which tells xargs to pass only ONE file at a time to gzip.

How to create tar file with only certain extensions but omitting server generated files with similar extension?

I have a folder of files and they will be in a pattern similar to this:
original.jpg
original.200px.jpg
original.300px.jpg
original.preview.jpg
original.slider.jpg
filetwo.jpg
filetwo.200px.jpg
filetwo.300px.jpg
filetwo.preview.jpg
filetwo.slider.jpg
imagethree.jpg
imagethree.200px.jpg
imagethree.300px.jpg
imagethree.preview.jpg
imagethree.slider.jpg
I want to ONLY select the original file (original.jpg, filetwo.jpg, imagethree.jpg) and omit the server generated files. I'm trying to create a tar file of just those original files and not the dynamically generated copies.
tar -tf file.tar --wildcards '*.jpg' --exclude '*.*.jpg'
Output:
filetwo.jpg
imagethree.jpg
original.jpg
Just change -t to -x to extract instead.
To create the archive:
tar -cf file.tar *.jpg --wildcards --exclude '*.*.jpg'

gzip on a folder without changing the file extension

So I am using amazon to serve a few files.
I want to gzip these files before I upload them
first I copy templates into a new folder
cp -r templates/ templatesGZIP
then I GZIP that folder
gzip -r templatesGZIP
the problem is that this adds .gz to all the file names. so for example homeTemplate.html changes to homeTemplate.html.gz
is there any way when running gzip -r templatesGZIP that I state I want to keep the extensions the same
Thanks
Dan
Bash script: Gzip an entire folder and keep files extensions same
This would surely help first compress them with gzip and then rename them.
Thanks & Regards,
Alok
gzip just does one thing, turns a single file into a gz archive. What you need is a tar.gz file. Your friend is tar, which can use gzip as well
cp -r templates templatesGZIP
tar czf templatesGZIP.tar.gz templatesGZIP
Backround: tar does another one thing well: it turns a directory structure into a single file. The tar commands above, explained:
c = create
z = zipped, default gzip
f FILE = name of the archive file
after copying the directory
find templatesGZIP -type f ! -wholename *images* -exec gzip {} \; -exec mv {}.gz {} \;
You can use the stdout as a temporary buffer and write the output in a file of your choise:
gzip -cr templatesGZIP > outputfile.extension
There is no option in gzip to do this. Using the two-directory method, the following should do the trick
for in_file in $(find templates -type f)
do
out_file="templatesGZIP/${in_file#templates/}"
mkdir -p "$(dirname "$out_file")"
gzip -c <"$in_file" >"$out_file"
done
With this method, there's no need for the cp command.
This has been tested.
One comment on this - it's uncommon to see gzip'ed files without an extension.

How to gzip all files in all sub-directories into one compressed file in bash

Possible Duplicate:
gzipping up a set of directories and creating a tar compressed file
This post describes how to gzip each file individually within a directory structure. However, I need to do something slightly different. I need to produce one big gzip file for all files under a certain directory. I also need to be able to specify the output filename for the compressed file (e.g., files.gz) and overwrite the old compressed file file if one already exists.
tar -zcvf compressFileName.tar.gz folderToCompress
everything in folderToCompress will go to compressFileName
Edit: After review and comments I realized that people may get confused with compressFileName without an extension. If you want you can use .tar.gz extension(as suggested) with the compressFileName
there are lots of compression methods that work recursively command line and its good to know who the end audience is.
i.e. if it is to be sent to someone running windows then zip would probably be best:
zip -r file.zip folder_to_zip
unzip filenname.zip
for other linux users or your self tar is great
tar -cvzf filename.tar.gz folder
tar -cvjf filename.tar.bz2 folder # even more compression
#change the -c to -x to above to extract
One must be careful with tar and how things are tarred up/extracted, for example if I run
cd ~
tar -cvzf passwd.tar.gz /etc/passwd
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
/etc/passwd
pwd
/home/myusername
tar -xvzf passwd.tar.gz
this will create
/home/myusername/etc/passwd
unsure if all versions of tar do this:
Removing leading `/' from member names
#amitchhajer 's post works for GNU tar. If someone finds this post and needs it to work on a NON GNU system, they can do this:
tar cvf - folderToCompress | gzip > compressFileName
To expand the archive:
zcat compressFileName | tar xvf -

Shell command to tar directory excluding certain files/folders

Is there a simple shell command/script that supports excluding certain files/folders from being archived?
I have a directory that need to be archived with a sub directory that has a number of very large files I do not need to backup.
Not quite solutions:
The tar --exclude=PATTERN command matches the given pattern and excludes those files, but I need specific files & folders to be ignored (full file path), otherwise valid files might be excluded.
I could also use the find command to create a list of files and exclude the ones I don't want to archive and pass the list to tar, but that only works with for a small amount of files. I have tens of thousands.
I'm beginning to think the only solution is to create a file with a list of files/folders to be excluded, then use rsync with --exclude-from=file to copy all the files to a tmp directory, and then use tar to archive that directory.
Can anybody think of a better/more efficient solution?
EDIT: Charles Ma's solution works well. The big gotcha is that the --exclude='./folder' MUST be at the beginning of the tar command. Full command (cd first, so backup is relative to that directory):
cd /folder_to_backup
tar --exclude='./folder' --exclude='./upload/folder2' -zcvf /backup/filename.tgz .
You can have multiple exclude options for tar so
$ tar --exclude='./folder' --exclude='./upload/folder2' -zcvf /backup/filename.tgz .
etc will work. Make sure to put --exclude before the source and destination items.
You can exclude directories with --exclude for tar.
If you want to archive everything except /usr you can use:
tar -zcvf /all.tgz / --exclude=/usr
In your case perhaps something like
tar -zcvf archive.tgz arc_dir --exclude=dir/ignore_this_dir
Possible options to exclude files/directories from backup using tar:
Exclude files using multiple patterns
tar -czf backup.tar.gz --exclude=PATTERN1 --exclude=PATTERN2 ... /path/to/backup
Exclude files using an exclude file filled with a list of patterns
tar -czf backup.tar.gz -X /path/to/exclude.txt /path/to/backup
Exclude files using tags by placing a tag file in any directory that should be skipped
tar -czf backup.tar.gz --exclude-tag-all=exclude.tag /path/to/backup
old question with many answers, but I found that none were quite clear enough for me, so I would like to add my try.
if you have the following structure
/home/ftp/mysite/
with following file/folders
/home/ftp/mysite/file1
/home/ftp/mysite/file2
/home/ftp/mysite/file3
/home/ftp/mysite/folder1
/home/ftp/mysite/folder2
/home/ftp/mysite/folder3
so, you want to make a tar file that contain everyting inside /home/ftp/mysite (to move the site to a new server), but file3 is just junk, and everything in folder3 is also not needed, so we will skip those two.
we use the format
tar -czvf <name of tar file> <what to tar> <any excludes>
where the c = create, z = zip, and v = verbose (you can see the files as they are entered, usefull to make sure none of the files you exclude are being added). and f= file.
so, my command would look like this
cd /home/ftp/
tar -czvf mysite.tar.gz mysite --exclude='file3' --exclude='folder3'
note the files/folders excluded are relatively to the root of your tar (I have tried full path here relative to / but I can not make that work).
hope this will help someone (and me next time I google it)
You can use standard "ant notation" to exclude directories relative.
This works for me and excludes any .git or node_module directories:
tar -cvf myFile.tar --exclude=**/.git/* --exclude=**/node_modules/* -T /data/txt/myInputFile.txt 2> /data/txt/myTarLogFile.txt
myInputFile.txt contains:
/dev2/java
/dev2/javascript
This exclude pattern handles filename suffix like png or mp3 as well as directory names like .git and node_modules
tar --exclude={*.png,*.mp3,*.wav,.git,node_modules} -Jcf ${target_tarball} ${source_dirname}
I've experienced that, at least with the Cygwin version of tar I'm using ("CYGWIN_NT-5.1 1.7.17(0.262/5/3) 2012-10-19 14:39 i686 Cygwin" on a Windows XP Home Edition SP3 machine), the order of options is important.
While this construction worked for me:
tar cfvz target.tgz --exclude='<dir1>' --exclude='<dir2>' target_dir
that one didn't work:
tar cfvz --exclude='<dir1>' --exclude='<dir2>' target.tgz target_dir
This, while tar --help reveals the following:
tar [OPTION...] [FILE]
So, the second command should also work, but apparently it doesn't seem to be the case...
Best rgds,
I found this somewhere else so I won't take credit, but it worked better than any of the solutions above for my mac specific issues (even though this is closed):
tar zc --exclude __MACOSX --exclude .DS_Store -f <archive> <source(s)>
After reading all this good answers for different versions and having solved the problem for myself, I think there are very small details that are very important, and rare to GNU/Linux general use, that aren't stressed enough and deserves more than comments.
So I'm not going to try to answer the question for every case, but instead, try to register where to look when things doesn't work.
IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO NOTICE:
THE ORDER OF THE OPTIONS MATTER: it is not the same put the --exclude before than after the file option and directories to backup. This is unexpected at least to me, because in my experience, in GNU/Linux commands, usually the order of the options doesn't matter.
Different tar versions expects this options in different order: for instance, #Andrew's answer indicates that in GNU tar v 1.26 and 1.28 the excludes comes last, whereas in my case, with GNU tar 1.29, it's the other way.
THE TRAILING SLASHES MATTER: at least in GNU tar 1.29, it shouldn't be any.
In my case, for GNU tar 1.29 on Debian stretch, the command that worked was
tar --exclude="/home/user/.config/chromium" --exclude="/home/user/.cache" -cf file.tar /dir1/ /home/ /dir3/
The quotes didn't matter, it worked with or without them.
I hope this will be useful to someone.
If you are trying to exclude Version Control System (VCS) files, tar already supports two interesting options about it! :)
Option : --exclude-vcs
This option excludes files and directories used by following version control systems: CVS, RCS, SCCS, SVN, Arch, Bazaar, Mercurial, and Darcs.
As of version 1.32, 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
.gitmodules
.gitattributes
.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
Option : --exclude-vcs-ignores
When archiving directories that are under some version control system (VCS), it is often convenient to read exclusion patterns from this VCS' ignore files (e.g. .cvsignore, .gitignore, etc.) This option provide such possibility.
Before archiving a directory, see if it contains any of the following files: cvsignore, .gitignore, .bzrignore, or .hgignore. If so, read ignore patterns from these files.
The patterns are treated much as the corresponding VCS would treat them, i.e.:
.cvsignore
Contains shell-style globbing patterns that apply only to the directory where this file resides. No comments are allowed in the file. Empty lines are ignored.
.gitignore
Contains shell-style globbing patterns. Applies to the directory where .gitfile is located and all its subdirectories.
Any line beginning with a # is a comment. Backslash escapes the comment character.
.bzrignore
Contains shell globbing-patterns and regular expressions (if prefixed with RE:(16). Patterns affect the directory and all its subdirectories.
Any line beginning with a # is a comment.
.hgignore
Contains posix regular expressions(17). The line syntax: glob switches to shell globbing patterns. The line syntax: regexp switches back. Comments begin with a #. Patterns affect the directory and all its subdirectories.
Example
tar -czv --exclude-vcs --exclude-vcs-ignores -f path/to/my-tar-file.tar.gz path/to/my/project/
I'd like to show another option I used to get the same result as the answers before provide, I had a similar case where I wanted to backup android studio projects all together in a tar file to upload to media fire, using the du command to find the large files, I found that I didn't need some directories like:
build, linux e .dart_tools
Using the first answer of Charles_ma I modified it a little bit to be able to run the command from the parent directory of the my Android directory.
tar --exclude='*/build' --exclude='*/linux' --exclude='*/.dart_tool' -zcvf androidProjects.tar Android/
It worked like a charm.
Ps. Sorry if this kind of answer is not allowed, if this is the case I will remove.
For Mac OSX I had to do
tar -zcv --exclude='folder' -f theOutputTarFile.tar folderToTar
Note the -f after the --exclude=
For those who have issues with it, some versions of tar would only work properly without the './' in the exclude value.
Tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.27.1
Command syntax that work:
tar -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz * --exclude=acme/foo
These will not work:
$ tar -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz * --exclude=./acme/foo
$ tar -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz * --exclude='./acme/foo'
$ tar --exclude=./acme/foo -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz *
$ tar --exclude='./acme/foo' -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz *
$ tar -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz * --exclude=/full/path/acme/foo
$ tar -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz * --exclude='/full/path/acme/foo'
$ tar --exclude=/full/path/acme/foo -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz *
$ tar --exclude='/full/path/acme/foo' -czvf ../allfiles-butsome.tar.gz *
I agree the --exclude flag is the right approach.
$ tar --exclude='./folder_or_file' --exclude='file_pattern' --exclude='fileA'
A word of warning for a side effect that I did not find immediately obvious:
The exclusion of 'fileA' in this example will search for 'fileA' RECURSIVELY!
Example:A directory with a single subdirectory containing a file of the same name (data.txt)
data.txt
config.txt
--+dirA
| data.txt
| config.docx
If using --exclude='data.txt' the archive will not contain EITHER data.txt file. This can cause unexpected results if archiving third party libraries, such as a node_modules directory.
To avoid this issue make sure to give the entire path, like --exclude='./dirA/data.txt'
After reading this thread, I did a little testing on RHEL 5 and here are my results for tarring up the abc directory:
This will exclude the directories error and logs and all files under the directories:
tar cvpzf abc.tgz abc/ --exclude='abc/error' --exclude='abc/logs'
Adding a wildcard after the excluded directory will exclude the files but preserve the directories:
tar cvpzf abc.tgz abc/ --exclude='abc/error/*' --exclude='abc/logs/*'
To avoid possible 'xargs: Argument list too long' errors due to the use of find ... | xargs ... when processing tens of thousands of files, you can pipe the output of find directly to tar using find ... -print0 | tar --null ....
# archive a given directory, but exclude various files & directories
# specified by their full file paths
find "$(pwd -P)" -type d \( -path '/path/to/dir1' -or -path '/path/to/dir2' \) -prune \
-or -not \( -path '/path/to/file1' -or -path '/path/to/file2' \) -print0 |
gnutar --null --no-recursion -czf archive.tar.gz --files-from -
#bsdtar --null -n -czf archive.tar.gz -T -
You can also use one of the "--exclude-tag" options depending on your needs:
--exclude-tag=FILE
--exclude-tag-all=FILE
--exclude-tag-under=FILE
The folder hosting the specified FILE will be excluded.
Use the find command in conjunction with the tar append (-r) option. This way you can add files to an existing tar in a single step, instead of a two pass solution (create list of files, create tar).
find /dir/dir -prune ... -o etc etc.... -exec tar rvf ~/tarfile.tar {} \;
You can use cpio(1) to create tar files. cpio takes the files to archive on stdin, so if you've already figured out the find command you want to use to select the files the archive, pipe it into cpio to create the tar file:
find ... | cpio -o -H ustar | gzip -c > archive.tar.gz
gnu tar v 1.26 the --exclude needs to come after archive file and backup directory arguments, should have no leading or trailing slashes, and prefers no quotes (single or double). So relative to the PARENT directory to be backed up, it's:
tar cvfz /path_to/mytar.tgz ./dir_to_backup --exclude=some_path/to_exclude
tar -cvzf destination_folder source_folder -X /home/folder/excludes.txt
-X indicates a file which contains a list of filenames which must be excluded from the backup. For Instance, you can specify *~ in this file to not include any filenames ending with ~ in the backup.
Success Case:
1) if giving full path to take backup, in exclude also should be used full path.
tar -zcvf /opt/ABC/BKP_27032020/backup_27032020.tar.gz --exclude='/opt/ABC/csv/' --exclude='/opt/ABC/log/' /opt/ABC
2) if giving current path to take backup, in exclude also should be used current path only.
tar -zcvf backup_27032020.tar.gz --exclude='ABC/csv/' --exclude='ABC/log/' ABC
Failure Case:
if giving currentpath directory to take backup and full path to ignore,then wont work
tar -zcvf /opt/ABC/BKP_27032020/backup_27032020.tar.gz --exclude='/opt/ABC/csv/' --exclude='/opt/ABC/log/' ABC
Note: mentioning exclude before/after backup directory is fine.
It seems to be impossible to exclude directories with absolute paths.
As soon as ANY of the paths are absolute (source or/and exclude) the exclude command will not work. That's my experience after trying all possible combinations.
Check it out
tar cvpzf zip_folder.tgz . --exclude=./public --exclude=./tmp --exclude=./log --exclude=fileName
I want to have fresh front-end version (angular folder) on localhost.
Also, git folder is huge in my case, and I want to exclude it.
I need to download it from server, and unpack it in order to run application.
Compress angular folder from /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps, move it to /tmp folder with name angular.23.12.19.tar.gz
Command :
tar --exclude='.git' -zcvf /tmp/angular.23.12.19.tar.gz /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/angular/
Your best bet is to use find with tar, via xargs (to handle the large number of arguments). For example:
find / -print0 | xargs -0 tar cjf tarfile.tar.bz2
Possible redundant answer but since I found it useful, here it is:
While a FreeBSD root (i.e. using csh) I wanted to copy my whole root filesystem to /mnt but without /usr and (obviously) /mnt. This is what worked (I am at /):
tar --exclude ./usr --exclude ./mnt --create --file - . (cd /mnt && tar xvd -)
My whole point is that it was necessary (by putting the ./) to specify to tar that the excluded directories where part of the greater directory being copied.
My €0.02
I had no luck getting tar to exclude a 5 Gigabyte subdirectory a few levels deep. In the end, I just used the unix Zip command. It worked a lot easier for me.
So for this particular example from the original post
(tar --exclude='./folder' --exclude='./upload/folder2' -zcvf /backup/filename.tgz . )
The equivalent would be:
zip -r /backup/filename.zip . -x upload/folder/**\* upload/folder2/**\*
(NOTE: Here is the post I originally used that helped me https://superuser.com/questions/312301/unix-zip-directory-but-excluded-specific-subdirectories-and-everything-within-t)
The following bash script should do the trick. It uses the answer given here by Marcus Sundman.
#!/bin/bash
echo -n "Please enter the name of the tar file you wish to create with out extension "
read nam
echo -n "Please enter the path to the directories to tar "
read pathin
echo tar -czvf $nam.tar.gz
excludes=`find $pathin -iname "*.CC" -exec echo "--exclude \'{}\'" \;|xargs`
echo $pathin
echo tar -czvf $nam.tar.gz $excludes $pathin
This will print out the command you need and you can just copy and paste it back in. There is probably a more elegant way to provide it directly to the command line.
Just change *.CC for any other common extension, file name or regex you want to exclude and this should still work.
EDIT
Just to add a little explanation; find generates a list of files matching the chosen regex (in this case *.CC). This list is passed via xargs to the echo command. This prints --exclude 'one entry from the list'. The slashes () are escape characters for the ' marks.

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