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Accepted
Faruk Uzun
Asked: 2012-02-22 03:43:11 +0800 CST

How to archive with ignoring files larger than 100MB

  • 772

I'm trying to archive files with tar and ignoring files larger than 100MB. Is that possible?
PS: Not have to use tar.

archive compression tar file-size

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Yeah there are probably a few more ways of doing this but you're probably best off with find as it's so tunable.

    find /path/to/dir -size -100M | xargs tar cvf archive.tar

    or 

    tar cvf archive.tar $(find /path/to/dir -size -100M)

    If there are other directories in the current folder which you do not want to archive, then use:

    find /path/to/dir -maxdepth 1 -size -100M | xargs tar cvf archive.tar

    Per the comments below, spaces can throw out some errors but in my testing they still seemed to get added to the archive when using the first method (a little strange in itself) but if you're worried, you can fix the find command to replace spaces with escaped versions.

    As ever, there are a billion ways of doing this.

    find /path/ -size -100M | sed 's/ /\\ /g' | xargs tar cvf archive.tar

find /path/ -size -100M -exec echo '"{}"' \; | xargs tar cvf archive.tar
    • 9

  2. Just exclude the big files like this:

    tar cf archive.tar /path/to/archive --exclude-from <(find /path/to/archive -size +100M)

    • 0