From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: Despite bugs 6665, 8380, 9201, 13115 being closed, the tar --exclude and --exclude-from options completely fail to work on subdirectories or files nested below the top level of the tar. My particular instance is a tarball specified on a relative path, but with exclusions tested for both absolute and relative path, specific name or wildcard, and about 8 hours of testing all the allowable option forms and quotation combinations. I was unable to get the desired behavior even once. Can't believe no one has needed this feature to date, but there is much to be found on Google about the persistance of this bug since at least year 2000. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): tar (GNU tar) 1.13.25 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: cd /home tar -cvjf --exclude '*.mp3' /var/backup-home/user.tbz user
try this: $ cd /home $ tar -cvj --exclude *.mp3 -f /var/backup-home/user.tbz user