How to I copy the directory and subfolders but ignore certain files in the subfolder?

Question

I believe the question is best asked with an example.

/home
   test1.txt
   test2.txt
   /home/my-folder
      test3.txt
      test4.txt

1. test1.txt, test2.txt and my-folder folder are inside /home.
2. test3.txt and text4.txt are inside /home/my-folder.

I want to copy all the contents of /home folder but exclude the 2 files (test3.txt and test4.txt) inside my-folder.

How can I do it using cp?

I know it's possible with rsync as I just tried it but there are times when rsync is not installed in a server and I don't have rights to install software.

Answer 1

You can do it with find(1) and cpio(1):

find /home -path './my-folder/test[34].txt' -prune -o \( -type f -print \) | \
    cpio -pdamv /some/other/dir

Answer 2

You can't do this with cp alone, short of listing the files to copy. Making partial copies goes beyond cp's capabilities.

Rsync is the obvious tool for the job and it's very widespread.

If you only have POSIX tools, you can use pax. You can omit files by rewriting their path to an empty string.

cd /home && pax -rw -pe -s'~^\./my-folder/test[34]\.txt$~~' . /path/to/destination

If you have only a minimal Linux server that lacks pax, see if its traditional equivalents cpio or tar are available. See lcd047's answer for a cpio example. With GNU tar, you can do

mkdir /path/to/destination
tar -cf - -C /home --exclude='./my-folder/test[34].txt' . |
  tar -xf - -C /path/to/destination

Answer 3

Rsync

I was in need of something like this and dive a bit on the forums. As mentioned from Gilles, I find that the best way is to use RSYNC. Two things that I like about it:

• You can use an external file like .gitignore as an input to exclude the files and folders you don't want to copy over.
• it's efficiency when you need to do repeat the same backup(copy) of the same source directory(you don't need to copy existing files or folders) as I will mention below in Example 4.

Example 1: Exclude a specific file:

rsync -a --exclude 'file.txt' originalDirectory/ backupDirectory/

Example 2: Exclude a specific folder(e.g. named dirName):

rsync -a --exclude 'dirName' originalDirectory/ backupDirectory/

Example 3: Exclude multiple files and folders:

rsync -a --exclude={'file1.txt', 'file2.json','dir1/*','dir2'} originalDirectory/ backupDirectory/

Example 4: Exclude multiple files and folders:

rsync -a --exclude-from='exclude.txt' originalDirectory/ backupDirectory/

exclude.txt contains the following:

file1.txt
file2.json
file3.pdf
dir1
dir2
*.png

Answer 4

How about

cp !(my-folder) /foo

Example:

$ find . -type f
./my-folder/test4.txt
./my-folder/test3.txt
./test2.txt
./test1.txt
$ echo cp !(my-folder) /foo
cp test1.txt test2.txt /foo
$