Linux – How to exclude files from TAR archive using regular expressions

archivelinuxregextar

I have a simple question, yet I can't find or solve the answer. I want to make a tar archive, but I want to exclude some files from it using regular expression.

Example of the file to exclude is this: 68x640X480.jpg

I have tried this with no luck:

tar cvf test.tar --exclude=[0-9]+x[0-9X]+\.jpg /data/foto

Can anybody help ?

Best Answer

You can use some additional tools like find and egrep:

find directory/ -type f -print | egrep -v '[0-9]+x[0-9X]+\.jpg' | tar cvfz directory.tar.gz -T -

The drawback of the above mentioned method is that it will not work for all possible file names. Another opportunity is to use the built-in exclude functionality of tar:

tar -czvf directory.tar.gz --exclude='*x*X*.jpg' directory

Unfortunately the second method does not work with regular expressions, but only with wildcards.

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