Hi,

I saw a couple of threads regarding copying directories and excluding files/folders but they weren't 100% what I was looking for.

I have a directory that I want to copy on an ARM device but I can't add programs to the filesystem so I'm reduced to find/cp. I want to exclude the /mnt directory completely but I also wanted to exclude any file/folder that has mmc in it since I'm copying these files to an sd card. I tried cp on the whole directory but it just endlessly copies the mmc/sd insert & tmp files so it never completes the cp process.

find (directory to search) (exclude files/folders) cp (everything else to sd card)

Thanks,
Jason

Just to make sure: You can only use cp and find? Using mkdir is out of the question?

If mkdir can be used, have a look at this:The search starts at the root directory (/),
The -type d only targets directories,
The ! \( -name "mnt" -prune -o -name "mmc" -prune \) excludes directories named mnt and mmc (including sub-directories),
The -exec mkdir -p "/new_location/"{} \; creates the found directories in the /new_location/ directory.

To test what is found: Remove the brown part.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you Druuna,

I did a test using new folders renamed to mnt/mmc and it copied everything but those folders. Also, yes I can use mkdir. I just saw the most common ways of doing this were using compression programs like gzip, rsync, and find/cp so thats why I said I only had those, I should have elaborated that better.

I also struggled to find a noob description of what each part of the command does so I really thank you for the description! I read quite a few helps about this way of copying but they didn't really make sense to me.

You're welcome.

BTW: Can you put up the [SOLVED] tag if this is answered to your satisfaction.
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