Is there a more efficient way to do this other than using tar tf and checking the output of every file against the file that I'm looking for?
This is the way I do it right now, but it's very slow (there are about 600-1000 archives that fit the search_patterns):
ARRAY=()
ARRAY[0]=/path/to/archives/*search_pattern1*
ARRAY[1]=/path/to/archives/*search_pattern2*
ARRAY[2]=/path/to/archives/*search_pattern3*
for f in ${ARRAY[#]}
do
if [[ $f =~ "matching_pattern1" ]]; then
if tar -tf "$f" | grep "matching_pattern2" ; then
printf "%s\n" $f;
exit 0;
fi
fi
done
For what it's worth, my search_patterns are 3 consecutive days, and I want first to find the archives that match the matching_pattern1 and then look through all these archives for matching_pattern2 and output the tar file that contains it.
There aren't many shortcuts, tar files are sequential in nature, the best you can do is to process each tar file at most once (and possibly multiple files in parallel). With GNU tar when searching a tar file you can do:
tar --wildcards -tzf file.tgz pattern [pattern...]
parallel -tk --tag tar --wildcards -tzvf ::: file*.tgz ::: "pattern"
using multiple patterns, matching file names will be displayed and exit code 0 if any are found. Remember to use "**" for a glob to match across directories.
However, if you're only looking for a single pattern per tar file, this really won't be measurably faster than your existing approach. GNU tar has optimizations for seekable tar files, but compression will counteract any benefits. Tar files can be incremental, split, updated and even contain multiple copies of the same file, there is no alternative to scanning the whole file (even though most tar files are not so complex).
If this is a recurring task, you might consider keeping an index file when the archives are created:
tar -czvf file.tgz files [...] > file.idx
or if you use GNU tar, add: --index-file=file.idx instead, one -v is filenames only, with -vv the index file will contain the full details as would be shown by -tv. (There does not appear to be a --index-file0 nul delimited option at this time.)
(In case it is useful, there are also alternatives to tar for this, see https://serverfault.com/questions/59795/is-there-a-smarter-tar-or-cpio-out-there-for-efficiently-retrieving-a-file-store )
If it's an one time operation and you have regular tar files (not gzipped), I would suggest using strings to extract all ASCII strings from the tar files, check the output with grep, and untar only those files for which the output matches your pattern. Filenames are kept in cleartext so strings will likely show them to you:
$ strings file.tar | grep test
test
test.c
test.c
test.js
test.pl
and strings may work a bit faster than tar tf.
You are relying on word splitting in that for loop. That's not a good idea (and isn't safe for oddly named files). You are better off letting the globs fill your array directly.
arr=(/path/to/archives/*search_pattern1* /path/to/archives/*search_pattern2* /path/to/archives/*search_pattern3*)
and using for f in "${arr[#]}".
Then something like this might work (it could be much faster for tarballs that have the file if it was a static file name but a glob is always going to scan the whole tarball).
for f in "${arr[#]}"; do
if tar -tf "$f" "matching_glob" &>/dev/null; do
echo "File found in $f"
fi
done
I'm trying to create a tar archive with a couple files, but rename those files in the archive. Right now I have something like this:
tar -czvf file1 /some/path/to/file2 file3 etc
But I'd like to do something like:
tar -czvf file1=file1 /some/path/to/file2=file2 file3=path/to/renamedFile3 etc=etc
Where, when extracted into directory testDir, you would see the files:
testDir/file1
testDir/file2
testDir/path/to/renamedFile3
testDir/etc
How can I do this?
You can modify filenames (among other things) with --transform. For example, to create a tape archive /tmp/foo.tar, putting files /etc/profile and /etc/bash.bashrc into it while also renaming profile to foo, you can do the following:
tar --transform='flags=r;s|bar|foo|' -cf file.tar file1 file2 bar fubar /dir/*
Results of the above is that bar is added to file.tar as foo.
The r flag means transformations are applied to regular files only. For more information see GNU tar documentation.
You can use --transform multiple times, for example:
tar --transform='flags=r;s|foo|bar|' --transform='flags=r;s|baz|woz|' -cf file.tar /some/dir/where/foo/is /some/dir/where/baz/is /other/stuff/* /dir/too
With --transform, there's no need to make a temporary testDir first. To prepend testDir/ to everything in the archive, match the beginning anchor ^:
tar --transform "s|file3|path/to/renamedFile3|" \
--transform "flags=r;s|^|testDir/|" \
-czvf my_archive.tgz file1 /some/path/to/file2 file3 etc
The r flag is critical to keep the transform from breaking any symlink targets in the archive (which also match ^).
We can refer to the man tar, the -O option is the best choice since files can be written to standard out.
-O (x, t modes only) In extract (-x) mode, files will be written to
standard out rather than being extracted to disk. In list (-t)
mode, the file listing will be written to stderr rather than the
usual stdout.
here are the examples:
# 1. without -O
tar xzf 20170511162930.db.tar.gz
# result: 20170511162930.db
# 2. with -O
tar xzf 20170511162930.db.tar.gz -O > latest.db
# result: latest.db
After not liking any solution that I've found, I've just written tarlogs.py, which lets you specify arbitrary names for tar entries. Each tar entry is constructed from one (or several) regular (or gzipped) inputs. You can also add directories, which will be recursed into as with regular tar. So in your case,
tarlogs.py -o file1 -i /some/path/to/file2 -o file2 -i file3 -o path/to/renamedFile3 -o /etc >output.tar
(-o with no -i inputs simply uses the output path as input, with no renaming)
This question has been up for a while, but for anyone who's looking for another suitable solution:
I've created a fork of the original GNU tar utility with additional support for file name mapping.
Usage example:
> touch myfile.txt
> tar cf file.tar ':myfile.txt:dir/inside/tar/newname.txt'
> tar tvf file.tar
-rw-rw-r-- user/user 0 2022-02-12 14:27 dir/inside/tar/newname.txt
The feature is triggered by prefixing file names with a colon (:) as shown above. A second colon functions as a separator between the source file location and the desired file name inside the archive.
:[source file]:[desired name inside the tar]
This feature is compatible with the -T (input list from file) flag.
How to compile it
> git clone https://github.com/leso-kn/tar
> cd tar
> ./bootstrap
> ./configure
> make -j4
# Run it
> src/tar --version
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.