If you are doing a substitution with sed but need to exclude a specific line or pattern, that can be accomplished by prefixing an exclusion and using “!”. For example, to substitute “hello” for “goodbye” in the following content, but to skip any line containing “world”, use syntax like the following: $ sed “/world/! s/hello/goodbye/g” … Bash: sed substitution with an exclusion pattern
If you are using tar to archive log files and find yourself needing to exclude certain extensions or older log files, tar can easily handle those type of situations. For example, to create a tar that excludes any rolled over logs that are zipped, use an ‘exclude’ like below: tar cvf mylogarchive.tar –exclude=*.gz –exclude=*.tgz * … Linux: Excluding files based on extension and age with tar
If you are using zip and find yourself needing to exclude a directory (.git, build, etc), the “-x” exclude switch can provide that functionality. Take the following directory structure: $ find . . ./two.txt ./skipme ./skipme/three.txt ./one.txt You can exclude the entire ‘skipme’ folder and everything in it with: zip -r myzip.zip * -x skipme/*