UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi

I greatly appreciate the forum and the people here very helpful

I could able to tar all the directories, sub dirs and the files. But unable to tar all the directories excluding the log and text files. Can anyone please advise the exact command to use for excluding .log and .txt?

PS: There is a huge list of files and directories. I am using solaris.


Best Regards
Olivia

Use find to generate the list of files you want, excluding *.txt and *.log, then pipe it into xargs which will run tar as appropriate.

You need -rf, not -cf, because tar may be run more than once on the same file, and you want it to append, not replace, when it does. This will let it process arbitrary amounts of files.

-I{} tells xargs to take quotes, spaces and commas in arguments literally instead of trying to process them.

Code:

find /path/to/files/ -type f '!' -name '*.txt' '!' -name '*.log' | xargs -I{} tar -rf backup.tar

Thank you so much. It worked for me

I'm glad you got an answer and it worked, but I have an alternative solution, assuming you've got something similar to the awesome GNU tar on your Solaris boxen:

Code:

tar -cf MYTAR --exclude='*.txt' --exclude='*.log'  DIR

In general, don't depend on having GNU unless you're on Linux.