Exclude range of directories according to regex

[FauveNoir]

General overview

I have installed as user with flatpack some package witch put all their stuffs in ~/.var/app/<name-of-package>. Also, this packages have, inside theire own directory a cache (or Cache it seems not normalized) directory.

So, I want to exclude all this directories from backup.

What I already did

--exclude-caches

Naturally, I started with --exclude-caches, but it doesn’t exclude at all theise directories.

--exclude with regex

I also give explicitly the path of theise directories with the following options:

	--exclude "re:$SRC/.var/app/.*/cache" \
	--exclude "re:$SRC/.var/app/.*/Cache" \
	--exclude "re:$SRC/.var/app/.*/cache/.*" \
	--exclude "re:$SRC/.var/app/.*/Cache/.*" \

But here again, borg seems just totaly ignoring these options, like if they had no effect.

What I saw

I also read in the documentation the pp option to match directory, but —as I understand— it’s waiting for an explicit directory path, and not a regex.

The question

How can I exclude a range of directories according to a regex?

[ThomasWaldmann]

The regexes you give need to match the paths that would be in the archive, see borg list ... output to see how the paths look like (especially note that there is no leading slash).

Then use borg create --list --dry-run ... to test your exclusions.

Alternatively to using just excludes, you can also use the more powerful patterns mechanism. If you have a lot of patterns, rather use a patterns file than giving them on the command line (using a file also avoids some pitfalls with the shell expanding some stuff, if not quoted correctly).

Yes, you need re: not pp: for what you want to do.

For some simple cases, using sh: might be easier than re:.

When using patterns and you are pretty sure you don't want to include something below an excluded directory, you can use ! instead of - to improve backup performance a bit and avoid issues in "special" directories like /proc.