Linux: how to exclude specific folder during copy in terminal

It is fun and fast to work with terminals in linux. I remember staring at the unnecessary fancy GUI progress bars in Windows. Ugh! I still wonder who would want to see the information that is being displayed in the fancy GUI progress bars. With the latest ones they even added a graph progress bar (O_o o_O) WHY?!?

rsync command:#

Rsync is a fast and versatile tool to copy files and folders locally, or to/from another host over any remote shell, or to/from a remote rsync daemon. Rsync has lot useful options. One of the useful option is --exclude. Using exclude option, we can exclude certain files/directories from copying as follows:

$ rsync -av --progress ./ /home/ashokma/public_html/ --exclude=.*

cp command:#

Copy files#

By default cp copies files from folder A to B.

$ cp index.html /home/ashokma/public_html

If we try to do the same for folders, we get the following log:

$ cp . /home/ashokma/public_html

cp: omitting directory '.' 

Even If there are files under the current directory, those files are not copied to public_html folder.

Copy folders as well as files recursively#

In order to copy the files and folders we need to supply recursive option as follows:

$ cp -r . /home/ashokma/public_html/

Simple enough, is it not!

Ignore specific folders during copying#

When we supply the -r, cp command tries to copy everything recursively under that folder including the hidden folders. I get the following logs, when I try to do cp -r under a git repository.

cp: cannot create regular file `/home/ashokma/public_html/./.git/objects/92/9323f0a105212d26776adb68dea40bd2603ac6': Permission denied
cp: cannot create regular file `/home/ashokma/public_html/./.git/objects/92/50cb893f62e0943e599e4384604f88ba540c0b': Permission denied
cp: cannot create regular file `/home/ashokma/public_html/./.git/objects/e9/c123a5ea6c5a542d0c27b40542c850bad59ee4': Permission denied
cp: cannot create regular file `/home/ashokma/public_html/./.git/objects/be/61ec8fb84e53ffbca728cccbf4a28d19c719d4': Permission denied
cp: cannot create regular file `/home/ashokma/public_html/./.git/objects/pack/pack-a1adf7cf19c0465e14013d5ebf5a69c81fbc31da.idx': Permission denied
cp: cannot create regular file `/home/ashokma/public_html/./.git/objects/pack/pack-a1adf7cf19c0465e14013d5ebf5a69c81fbc31da.pack': Permission denied
cp: cannot create regular file `/home/ashokma/public_html/./.git/objects/bc/cac8d4bfe7b7586ec50610e939264bd8931f61': Permission denied

I do not want these .git/objects which are repository specific being copied. Now, we need to write a small query command excluding the directory we want:

$ cp -r `ls --ignore=.*` /home/ashokma/public_html/

--ignore takes shell pattern, so here it ignores the following folders for me: .git, ./, ../

Prefer rsync over cp in case you want to copy a bunch and also want to copy to remote host as I do mostly for my blog. With the help of rsync daemon, it only copies the files those have changes. It works as it was named, it synchronizes the files to keep them update. ^_^