On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 04:37:47PM +0100, Darac Marjal wrote: > $ find /home/me/dirToARchive -print -depth | grep -v -x -f > paths-to-exclude.txt | cpio -o -H ustar | gz > archive.tar.gz > > cpio takes a list of filenames to archive on stdin, so we use find to list > what we want, then filter that list through grep ("-f foo" says to get a > list of filter expressions from file foo) before passing to cpio (which > we've told to make a tar archive rather than its native format).
You still don't want to archive absolute pathnames. And GNU tar can also read filenames from stdin, with a special GNU option.