Tips and tricks for LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) developers.

When I cant find a suitable solution to a problem and have to work it out for myself I'll post the result here so hopefully others will find it useful. (All code is offered in good faith. It may not be the best solution, just a solution).

Friday 4 April 2008

Exclude certain files from a cp command

I needed to be able to exclude files with a certain extension from a cp command that was going to be executed automatically as part of a much larger script.

There doesn't seem to be any direct way to do this (e.g. cp --exclude...) and although there are several suggestions on the net on how to overcome this I found the neatest way was to use the tar command instead:

cd /copy/from/path
tar -czf /path/to/archive.tar.gz ./ --exclude=*.txt
cd /copy/to/path
tar -xzvf /path/to/archive.tar.gz

Of course this isn't ideal, creating a tar archive when it isn't necessary but the files I needed to copy weren't large and so it was nice and quick and dirty.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

another solution using tar (it's a single command):
tar -C sourcedir --exclude=".svn" -cf - . | tar -C targetdir -xpf -