Ubuntu – How to use tar to exclude all files of a certain directory

tar

A client uploads files to a development server. When it's time to upload the project to a production server, those files are no longer needed, and we'd like to exclude them from the tar file we'll eventually push to production. However, we still want to keep the directory in tact, it's only the files that are not needed

Using Ubuntu 16 and tar 1.28, we've tried:

tar -vczf archive.tar.gz . --exclude=wp-content/uploads/wpallimport/files/*
tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive

We've also tried enclosing exclude= parameter in single and double quotations, no luck. 

tar -vczf archive.tar.gz . --exclude='wp-content/uploads/wpallimport/files/*'
tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive

The official website shows –exclude without equals sign

tar -vczf file.tar.gz --exclude 'directory/*' . and gives the same error.

How is this done?

Best Answer

The usual gotcha with tar's --exclude option is that it is relative to the directory argument e.g. given

$ tree dir
dir
└── subdir
    └── subsubdir
        ├── file1
        ├── file2
        └── file3

2 directories, 3 files

then

$ tar cvf dir.tar.gz --exclude='/dir/subdir/subsubdir/*' dir
dir/
dir/subdir/
dir/subdir/subsubdir/
dir/subdir/subsubdir/file1
dir/subdir/subsubdir/file2
dir/subdir/subsubdir/file3

fails to exclude the contents of subsubdir (it's trying to exclude dir/dir/subdir/subsubdir/*, which doesn't match anything); what you want is

$ tar cvf dir.tar.gz --exclude='subdir/subsubdir/*' dir
dir/
dir/subdir/
dir/subdir/subsubdir/

AFAIK the order doesn't matter except that the output file must immediately follow the f option.

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