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how do I tar.gz everything apart from jpg/gif/png/wmv/flv/zips, recursively, via the Unix shell?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Dec 10 '09 at 0:47

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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

Use the --exclude option:

tar czvf myarchive.tar.gz --exclude=\*.{jpg,gif,png,wmv,flv,tar.gz,zip} rootdir
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Just make sure you're running gnu tar, otherwise this flag won't exist. On solaris you can specify an exclude file though. – Darren Hall Dec 10 '09 at 1:07
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up vote 2 down vote 
find -type f -a ! \( \
                     -name '*.jpg' -o \
                     -name '*.gif' -o \
                     -name '*.png' -o \
                     -name '*.wmv' -o \
                     -name '*.flv' -o \
                     -name '*.tar.gz' -o \
                     -name '*.zip' \) \
 | xargs tar rvfz files.tgz

I used multilple lines to make it easier to edit later in case you made this into a shell script or shell function.

I use the -r flag for tar in case the number of files exceeds 1 call into xargs. This way you can't exceed the argument buffer for tar.

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up vote 2 down vote 

  find ./ -type f | egrep -v "\.(jpg|gif|png|wmv|flz|zips)$" | xargs tar -czf filename.tgz
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you may have had a typo with "zips", so edit accordingly – Kevin Lochner Dec 10 '09 at 0:57
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Do you want to be a $ at the end there? Won't your egrep filter out jpg.txt? – Suppressingfire Dec 10 '09 at 1:09
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tar (c)reate + xargs can be dangerous if your arg length is long enough that tar is called twice. – Darren Hall Dec 10 '09 at 1:16
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