Copy Files with Excludes

The cp command does not have an excludes option. One way to copy files ignores some files or directories is to create a tarball. The tar command has an exclude option. The exclude patterns can be mentioned in a separate file and passed in to the tar command.

# Directory Structure
BO
│   .git
│   .gitignore
│   books.html
│   book.js
│   build.sh
│   buildExcludes
│   main.js
│   manifest.json
│
├───bin
│   └───BO
│       │   books.html
│       │   books.js
│       │   main.js
│       │   manifest.json
│       │
│       └───res
│           └───icons
│                   bo-128.png
│                   bo-16.png
│                   bo-256.png
│                   bo-32.png
│                   bo-48.png
│                   bo-512.png
│                   bo-64.png
│
└───res
    └───icons
            bo-128.png
            bo-16.png
            bo-256.png
            bo-32.png
            bo-48.png
            bo-512.png
            bo-64.png
            bo.fla

In the above directory structure, I want to copy certain file to bin/BO but ignore others like .git, fla files in the res/icons directory, the build scripts etc. For that first create an file say buildExcludes with the exclude pattern.
Content of the exclude file is given below.

.git
.gitignore
bin
res/icons/*.fla
build.sh
buildExcludes

Create the tar, deflate to the destination directory and delete the tar once done.

tar -cvf bo.tar * -X buildExcludes  #create tar
tar -xvf bo.tar -C bin/BO/          #deflate to destination directory
rm -f bo.tar                        #cleanup