How to reliably(!) exclude files from a list in tar?

This is bothering me for years now, my backup script always takes everything with it, taking forever to finish.

I initially used the –exclude option, but this is rather restrictive, cluttered the script and still had the excluded directories.
Then i discovered -X/–exclude-from but same result here, weird globbing and still fails.
So i hacked a negative list via fd’s –ignore-file and tar -T/–files-from together. But tar still includes files and directories not on the fucking files.tmp.

So i’m not sure if it is a bug in Arch’s GNU tar or if it’s maybe a parameter in the wrong position, tar can be bitchy there. This is my current code


<span style="color:#323232;"># tar -cf - -X "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/backup/ignore "$INPUT" -P
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">fd . -Hi --ignore-file "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/backup/ignore "${INPUT}" > "$_tmpfile"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">tar -cf - --verbatim-files-from --files-from="$_tmpfile" -P 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">	|pv -tapes "$_fssize" 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">	|compress >"${OUTPUT}.$_ext"
</span>

INPUT is $HOME in this case.

And if anyone has a solution that works on busybox tar as well…

MonkderDritte,

Thanks!

I save it for now, until i work on it again. Possibly the wildcards thing. And that tar includes files of folders given too, from someone else (how to work with that).

lurch,

–exclude works reliable for me. can you give us an example of an --exclude and the file name that tar outputs when adding it?

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

How to reliably(!) exclude files from a list in tar?

You delete the entire file because the format and tools are hard to deal with for basic operations like this one. :)

Just kidding… but we know there’s some truth to it.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

I don't know what fd does, but at a guess maybe what you're missing is that tar includes all the files in directories you give it? So if you exclude 'foo/bar' but include 'foo' then foo/bar will be in your tar file.

What I do is basically tar cf ls ~ | grep -v $files_to_exclude but if you want to exclude something that isn't a top-level directory you'd need to get slightly more fancy.

kbal, (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

...more fancy such as using tar -X, which works for me. I'd never actually tried it before. The 'weird globbing' it uses is regular expressions, which are worth learning how to use. Run grep "$expression" $_tmpfile where $expression is a line from your exclude file to see which files it's going to match and exclude.

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