UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

OS: SunOS perfs01 5.8 Generic_117350-23 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraAX-i2

I want to tar a directory, but there are subdirectoires I want to exclude. Does anyone know how to do it?

Please help.

thanks.

You could use the "-L InputList" argument and provide the list of directories (and/or files) to include in a file ('man tar' for more info). If you can generate the list of directories easily then this works well.
This option needs care tho as (for obvious reasons) tar doesn't descend recursively through directories in an InputList, so each directory needs to be specifically included - this is probably what you want so that you can, say, tar a directory and some, but not all, of its children.

hope this helps

cheers