How can I use cp to copy a directory but ignore a certain sub directory in Linux

Due to a Hard disk problem I am trying to shift a partition from one hard disk to another. I am following article to do that. In the copying part I would like to ignore one particular sub directory. How can I accomplish that keeping in mind when copying I have to preserve my owner group and time stamp. There is around 700 GB of data that needs to be copied if I do not ignore a particular subdirectory.

6 Answers

rsync -ax --exclude [relative path to directory to exclude] /path/from /path/to

You might want (or not) to use --del as well. Check the manual page.

Normally I use cpio as follows,

cd source_dir; find . -depth | cpio -pdmv dest_dir 

And since this is a pipeline you can put a "subtraction filter" in the middle.

cd sourcedir; find . -depth | grep -v exclude_dir | cpio -pdmv dest_dir 

or you could split this is into several steps,

cd source_dir; find . -depth > files.lst gedit files.lst # (take out the offending directory and files and save back to files.lst) cpio -pdmv dest_dir < files.lst 

Of course I'd test this on something smaller first but you get the idea.

You could write a simple bash script with a loop to ignore the certain path you don't want copied and copy the rest. Another solution could be to us regular expressions. You can read up on bash scripting here -> Regex tutorial here ->

Can you temporarily move (mv) the large subdirectory to some other location, do the copy, and then restore the subdirectory? I can't see a direct option in cp to do this.

Rather ugly solution but... why not just cp everything in the directory non recursively, and then copy the individual directories over recursively?

So why not just

cp -Rv [SRC] [DEST] | grep -v [EXCLUDE]