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…

  • @TCB13
    link
    English
    -44 months ago

    How to reliably(!) exclude files from a list in tar?

    You delete the entire file because the format and tools are hard to deal with for basic operations like this one. :)

    Just kidding… but we know there’s some truth to it.