How to use 'cp' command to exclude a specific directory?

Question

I want to copy all files in a directory except some files in a specific sub-directory. I have noticed that cp command didn't have the --exclude option. So, how can I achieve this?

Answer 1

rsync is fast and easy:

rsync -av --progress sourcefolder /destinationfolder --exclude thefoldertoexclude

You can use --exclude multiples times.

rsync -av --progress sourcefolder /destinationfolder --exclude thefoldertoexclude --exclude anotherfoldertoexclude

Note that the dir thefoldertoexclude after --exclude option is relative to the sourcefolder, i.e., sourcefolder/thefoldertoexclude.

Also you can add -n for dry run to see what will be copied before performing real operation, and if everything is ok, remove -n from command line.

Answer 2

Well, if exclusion of certain filename patterns had to be performed by every unix-ish file utility (like cp, mv, rm, tar, rsync, scp, ...), an immense duplication of effort would occur. Instead, such things can be done as part of globbing, i.e. by your shell.

bash

man 1 bash, / extglob.

Example:

$ shopt -s extglob
$ echo images/*
images/004.bmp images/033.jpg images/1276338351183.jpg images/2252.png
$ echo images/!(*.jpg)
images/004.bmp images/2252.png

So you just put a pattern inside !(), and it negates the match. The pattern can be arbitrarily complex, starting from enumeration of individual paths (as Vanwaril shows in another answer): !(filename1|path2|etc3), to regex-like things with stars and character classes. Refer to the manpage for details.

zsh

man 1 zshexpn, / filename generation.

You can do setopt KSH_GLOB and use bash-like patterns. Or,

% setopt EXTENDED_GLOB
% echo images/*
images/004.bmp images/033.jpg images/1276338351183.jpg images/2252.png
% echo images/*~*.jpg
images/004.bmp images/2252.png

So x~y matches pattern x, but excludes pattern y. Once again, for full details refer to manpage.

---

fish^new!

The fish shell has a much prettier answer to this:

🐟 cp (string match -v '*.excluded.names' -- srcdir/*) destdir

---

Bonus pro-tip

Type cp *, hit CtrlX* and just see what happens. ^{it's not harmful I promise}

Answer 3

Why use rsync when you can do:

find . -type f -not -iname '*/not-from-here/*' -exec cp '{}' '/dest/{}' ';'

This assumes the target directory structure being the same as the source's.

Answer 4

cp -r `ls -A | grep -v "c"` $HOME/

Answer 5

The easiest way I found, where you can copy all the files excluding files and folders just by adding their names in the parentheses:

shopt -s extglob
cp -r !(Filename1 | FoldernameX | Filename2) Dest/

Answer 6

It's relative to the source directory.
This will exclude the directory source/.git from being copied.

rsync -r --exclude '.git' source target

Answer 7

Expanding on mvds’s comment, this works for me

cd dotfiles
tar -c --exclude .git --exclude README . | tar -x -C ~/dotfiles2

Answer 8

rsync is actually quite tricky. have to do multiple tests to make it work.

Let's say you want to copy /var/www/html to /var/www/dev but need to exclude /var/www/html/site/video/ directory maybe due to its size. The command would be:

rsync -av --exclude 'sites/video' /var/www/html/ /var/www/dev

Some caveat:

1. The last slash / in the source is needed, otherwise it will also copy the source directory rather than its content and becomes /var/www/dev/html/xxxx, which maybe is not what you want.

2. The the --exclude path is relative to the source directly. Even if you put full absolute path, it will not work.

3. -v is for verbose, -a is for archive mode which means you want recursion and want to preserve almost everything.

Answer 9

cp -rv `ls -A | grep -vE "dirToExclude|targetDir"` targetDir

Edit: forgot to exclude the target path as well (otherwise it would recursively copy).

Answer 10

rsync

rsync -r --verbose --exclude 'exclude_pattern' ./* /to/where/

and first try it with -n option to see what is going to be copied

Answer 11

I assume you're using bash or dash. Would this work?

shopt -s extglob  # sets extended pattern matching options in the bash shell
cp $(ls -laR !(subdir/file1|file2|subdir2/file3)) destination

Doing an ls excluding the files you don't want, and using that as the first argument for cp

Answer 12

Just move it temporally into a hidden directory (and rename it after, if wanted).

mkdir .hiddendir
cp * .hiddendir -R
mv .hiddendir realdirname

Answer 13

rsync went unavailable for us. Below is an alternative that works.

tar -cf - --exclude='./folder' --exclude='./file.tar' ./source_directory | tar -xf - -C ./destination_directory

Answer 14

Another simpler option is to install and use rsync which has an ``--exclude-dir` option, and can be used for both local and remote files.

Answer 15

This is a modification of Linus Kleen's answer. His answer didn't work for me because there would be a . added in front of the file path which cp doesn't like (the path would look like source/.destination/file).

This command worked for me:

find . -type f -not -path '*/exlude-path/*' -exec cp --parents '{}' '/destination/' \;

the --parents command preserves the directory structure.

Answer 16

cp -r `ls -A | grep -v "Excluded_File_or_folder"` ../$target_location -v

Answer 17

ls -I "filename1" -I "filename2" | xargs cp -rf -t destdir 

The first part ls all the files but hidden specific files with flag -I. The output of ls is used as standard input for the second part. xargs build and execute command cp -rf -t destdir from standard input. the flag -r means copy directories recursively, -f means copy files forcibly which will overwrite the files in the destdir, -t specify the destination directory copy to.

Answer 18

mv tobecopied/tobeexcluded .
cp -r tobecopied dest/
mv tobeexcluded tobecopied/

Answer 19

10 years late. Credits to Linus Kleen.

I hate rsync! ;) So why not use find and cp? And with this answer also mkdir to create a non-existent folder structure.

cd /source_folder/ && find . -type d -not -path '*/not-from-here/*' -print -exec mkdir -p '/destination_folder/{}' \;

cd /source_folder/ && find . -type f -not -path '*/not-from-here/*' -print -exec cp -au '{}' '/destination_folder/{}' \;

It looks like cd ìs necessary to concat relative paths with find.

mkdir -p will create all subfolders and will not complain when a folder already exists.

---

Housten we have the next problem. What happens when someone creates a new folder with a new file in the middle of it? Exactly: it will fail for these new files. (Solution: just run it again! :)) The solution to put everything into one find command seems difficult.

---

For clean-up: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/627218/239596

Answer 20

I use a "do while" loop to read the output of the find command. In this example, I am matching (rather than excluding) certain patterns since there are a more limited number of pattern matches that I want than that I don't want. You could reverse the logic with a -not in front of the -iname flags:

find . -type f -iname "*.flac" -o -print0 -iname "*.mp3" -print0 -o -iname "*.wav" -print0 -o -iname "*.aac" -print0 -o -iname "*.wma" -print0 | while read -d $'\0' file; do cp -ruv "$file" "/media/wd/network_sync/music/$file"; done

I use the above to copy all music type files that are newer on my server than the files on a Western Digital TV Live Hub that I have mounted at /media/wd. I use the above because I have a lot of DVD files, mpegs, etc. that I want to exclude AND because for some reason rsync looks like it is copying, but after I look at the wd device, the files are not there despite no errors during the rsync with this command:

rsync -av --progress --exclude=*.VOB --exclude=*.avi --exclude=*.mkv --exclude=*.ts --exclude=*.mpg --exclude=*.iso --exclude=*ar --exclude=*.vob --exclude=*.BUP --exclude=*.cdi --exclude=*.ISO --exclude=*.shn --exclude=*.MPG --exclude=*.AVI --exclude=*.DAT --exclude=*.img --exclude=*.nrg --exclude=*.cdr --exclude=*.bin --exclude=*.MOV --exclude=*.goutputs* --exclude=*.flv --exclude=*.mov --exclude=*.m2ts --exclude=*.cdg --exclude=*.IFO --exclude=*.asf --exclude=*.ite /media/2TB\ Data/data/music/* /media/wd/network_sync/music/