Excluding a list of files from tar with spaces in filenames

[Dotan Cohen]

On 4 February 2010 22:59, Meir Kriheli <meir at mksoft.co.il> wrote:
> On 02/04/2010 09:12 PM, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>>
>> I hope there is a bash guru out there today. I need to script a backup
>> plan which has a list of directories that should not be backed up.
>> Some of these directories have spaces in their filenames. The
>> following script works so long as there are no directories with spaces
>> in DONT_COPY, however, I cannot figure out what to do to get it to
>> work _with_ spaces in filenames:
>>
>> #!/bin/bash
>>
>> DONT_COPY="
>> .adobe/
>> File with Spaces
>> .bin/google-earth
>> Yet Another Annoying Filename
>> "
>>
>> DONT_COPY_LIST=""
>> for pattern in $DONT_COPY ; do DONT_COPY_LIST="$DONT_COPY_LIST
>> --exclude=$pattern "; done
>> tar -zcvf - * $DONT_COPY_LIST
>>
>>
>> Any ideas? Thanks!
>>
>
> Set IFS to newlines only:
>
> IFS=$'\n'
>
> BTW, why don't you use -X or --exclude-from ? From man:
>
>       -X, --exclude-from=FILE
>              exclude files matching patterns listed in FILE
>

Thanks, Meir, I just got this to work:

EXCLUDES=`tempfile`
cat >$EXCLUDES <<EOLIST
$DONT_COPY
EOLIST

tar -zcvf - *  --exclude-from $EXCLUDES > out.tar

rm -f $EXCLUDES



By the way, because of the "v" flag, tar outputs all the directories
that it copies to the terminal (even though this is running in a
script). How can I capture that output to a variable or to another
temp file?


-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il

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