I'm trying to archive a site excluding all PDF files in order to keep the size down. I have manged to do this in the past using the exclude argument in the tar command and something along the lines of *.pdf. Unfortunately, I failed at the time to note the syntax that I used and have been unsuccessfully trying to do it ever since.

I would be really grateful if someone could help me out with this - the simplest solution please as I am no command line jockey.

Thanks in advance

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Stuart Curran
stuart@aardvarkmedia.co.uk

Create a file which contains filnames or dir names to be excluded.

ex: ls *.pdf > exclude.files

then use -X or --exclude-file option

tar -cvfX xxx.tar exclude.files /tar/this/dir