Excluding a list of files from tar with spaces in filenames

[Meir Kriheli]

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

Cheers
--
Meir