This is bothering me for years now, my backup script always takes everything with it, taking forever to finish.
I initially used the --exclude option, but this is rather restrictive, cluttered the script and still had the excluded directories.
Then i discovered -X/--exclude-from but same result here, weird globbing and still fails.
So i hacked a negative list via fd’s --ignore-file and tar -T/--files-from together. But tar still includes files and directories not on the fucking files.tmp.
So i’m not sure if it is a bug in Arch’s GNU tar or if it’s maybe a parameter in the wrong position, tar can be removed there. This is my current code
# tar -cf - -X "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/backup/ignore "$INPUT" -P
fd . -Hi --ignore-file "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/backup/ignore "${INPUT}" > "$_tmpfile"
tar -cf - --verbatim-files-from --files-from="$_tmpfile" -P \
|pv -tapes "$_fssize" \
|compress >"${OUTPUT}.$_ext"
INPUT is $HOME in this case.
And if anyone has a solution that works on busybox tar as well…
I use tar with a an external file for exclude and include files on my custom backup script. There is a
--wildcardsoption, which lets you use*(star) to exclude everything from a directory. The command looks like this:tar --create \ --zstd \ --verbose \ --restrict \ --force-local \ --wildcards \ --exclude-backups \ --exclude-from "${exclude_file}" \ --files-from "${include_file}" \ --file "${archive_file}"And the include_file is a simple text file with newline separated paths. It looks like this: