Using find to exclude a directory and tar up everything else in a directory

Question

I have following in a directory:

dir1
dir2
file1
file2

I want to tar up everything except dir1

When I do:

find . -path '*dir1*' -prune -o -print

I don't see dir1 in the output ( as expected)

But when I do:

find . -path '*dir1*' -prune -o -exec tar -czvf documents.tgz  '{}' \+

I see that dir1 also gets tarred up in documents.tgz. Why ?

Answer 1

It's because of the . in the output. . also gets tared.

Use this intead, it will exclude both; . and dir1:

find . -not -path '*dir1*' -not -path "." -exec tar -czvf documents.tgz  '{}' \+

See the contents of documents.tgz:

$ tar tf documents.tgz
./file2
./file1
./dir2/

Answer 2

tar also has an "exclude" option you can add one or more times.

For example:

tar czvf documents.tgz --exlude dir1 --exclude dir2 * 

Note: I would rather create the tar in a different directory, to avoid including documents.tgz itself in tar in case you run the command another time without deleting it in the meantime.