I'm trying to build an ISO image from a large file tree. But I want to exclude a portion of that tree from the ISO. When I try to construct the tree selectively using each of the names within the tree (except the ones to be excluded), mkisofs flattens the tree out and reports conflicts of like names from different sources. Even with graft points used, the same happens.

Does this program even have the capability to specify that? The man page doesn't show anything.

My workaround is to reconstruct the tree in another location, less the excluded parts, and run mkisofs on that. When one name is given to mkisofs it works fine. But this reconstructing takes time to build.

From the man page :-

cheers

The -m option didn't work. I tried it with both a directory name, and a directory name with "*" appended.

Apparently some other form not shown in the example is needed to match the entire tree. Maybe it is as complex as rsync, but with a different syntax.

The problem appears to be that there is no syntax for -m to provide for "top of the path" matching. I tried a leading ^ (regexp) and a leading / (glob) character, but no joy. Without this, the string matches blindly at all levels.

Wouldn't a simple "-m '*pattern*'" work ?

<edit> just ran a test.. results as follows:

[me@xxxxxx tmp]$ ls -R1 blah/
blah/:
test

blah/test:
anotherthing
something
test2

blah/test/anotherthing:

blah/test/something:

blah/test/test2:
crapola

blah/test/test2/crapola:

[me@xxxxxx tmp]$ mkisofs -r -m '*test2*' -o test.iso blah
I: -input-charset not specified, using utf-8 (detected in locale settings)
Total translation table size: 0
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 812
Total directory bytes: 6496
Path table size(bytes): 54
Max brk space used 22000
178 extents written (0 MB)

[me@xxxxxx tmp]$ sudo mount -o loop ./test.iso /mnt/iso
[me@xxxxxx tmp]$ ls -R1 /mnt/iso/
/mnt/iso/:
test

/mnt/iso/test:
anotherthing
something

/mnt/iso/test/anotherthing:

/mnt/iso/test/something:

So it seems to work for me ... cheers </edit>

The problem is if you have "xyzzy" as a top level directory, and also have "xyzzy" as a subdirectory under some other top levels, then -m "*xyzzy" omits all of them. I want to make a pattern that specifically matches only the top level, and not the subdirectories. In grep I would prefix it with the ^ character.

Yes, that is a problem .. it's only a shell glob not a regex. Wouldn't that mean you're trying to create an iso from an entire filesystem - from / down ?

Not from / down, but from a specific directory and down, but I want to omit a few subdirectories without having to make a copy where I could just rm them.

If the directory is writable and not being used elsewhere at the time, you could mv the undesired subtrees away, build the ISO, and mv them back. Try that on a read/only mount (like another DVD).

Then couldn't you make the glob longer ?

Modifying my previous test:

That still does not do what I want. This example will omit anything with "blah/test/test2" in the path. That's not what I want. What I want is to omit things ONLY where the TOP of the path begins with the specified string, and NOT omit things where that string exists in only in a lower part of the path. If I want to omit the entire tree that begins with directory "foo", making the glob longer will possibly fail to omit that entire tree.

I'm concluding that mkisofs simply does not have this capability.