How to Use 'Cp' Command to Exclude a Specific Directory

How to use 'cp' command to exclude a specific directory?

rsync is fast and easy:

rsync -av --progress sourcefolder /destinationfolder --exclude thefoldertoexclude

You can use --exclude multiples times.

rsync -av --progress sourcefolder /destinationfolder --exclude thefoldertoexclude --exclude anotherfoldertoexclude

Note that the dir thefoldertoexclude after --exclude option is relative to the sourcefolder, i.e., sourcefolder/thefoldertoexclude.

Also you can add -n for dry run to see what will be copied before performing real operation, and if everything is ok, remove -n from command line.

Exclude directory while copy directory

You could exclude the directories as part of find results before the copy, but using rsync or cp with the '!' support enabled as suggested by Sathiya is a much simpler solution.

See find example below:

find /root/tmp/ -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -regex '\(.*a\|.*b\)' -exec cp -r {} /root/tmp1/ \;

Copy whole directory but exclude all folders and subfolders with certain name

Instead of cp, you can use tar with option --exclude to control what you want copied or not.

The full command is:

tar --exclude="outdir" -cvpf - . | (cd TARGET_DIRECTORY; tar -xpf -)

• So any path that contains the "outdir" pattern will be excluded.
• Without the --exclude option, it will copy the entire structure of your current directory under TARGET_DIRECTORY.
• You can replace the . in the first tar by your desired source directory.

cp dir recursivly excluding 2 subdirs

Maybe the find command will help you:

$ find /home/directory -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -name 'subdirectory[57]' -or -exec cp -r {} /path/to/dir \;

Copy folder recursively, excluding some folders

Use rsync:

rsync -av --exclude='path1/to/exclude' --exclude='path2/to/exclude' source destination

Note that using source and source/ are different. A trailing slash means to copy the contents of the folder source into destination. Without the trailing slash, it means copy the folder source into destination.

Alternatively, if you have lots of directories (or files) to exclude, you can use --exclude-from=FILE, where FILE is the name of a file containing files or directories to exclude.

--exclude may also contain wildcards, such as --exclude=*/.svn*

Shell command to tar directory excluding certain files/folders

You can have multiple exclude options for tar so

$ tar --exclude='./folder' --exclude='./upload/folder2' -zcvf /backup/filename.tgz .

etc will work. Make sure to put --exclude before the source and destination items.

cp command should ignore some files

To ignore a git directory specifically, I'd try git export first.

But in general, to copy a directory tree excluding certain files or folders, I'd recommend using rsync instead of cp. The syntax is mostly the same, but rsync has way more options, including one to exclude selected files:

rsync -rv --exclude=.git demo demo_bkp

See e.g. the man page for more info.

script to copy from source to target folder, how to exclude one folder from source folder

Assuming odd_one is the name of directory you want to exclude, you can do :

shopt -s extglob
cp -r --preserve=ownership,mode  $source_folder/!(odd_one) $target_folder

As you use a normal use to write into ~/.snapshot, you should not use sudo to do rm.

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