Things you need to know before compressing files and foldersīefore you start to compress files and folders, there are two things you have to know. But don't worry! Here I'll show you how to use Mac's built-in file compression tool and a highly recommended Mac file compressor to compress files or folders on Mac. In general, compressing files in modern operating systems is a complex technique to learn. Let’s change the content in the exclude_file.If you have lots of large files or folders on your Mac, it is wise to compress them in order to get more free space, for compressed files take up less space on your Mac's hard disk than uncompressed files. The tar command allows us to also include file extension patterns to be skipped in the exclude file. It’s a short method of writing the –exclude-from option: $ tar -zcvf -exclude-from='exclude_file.txt'. We’re using the -X option to enter an exclude file. We’ll use this exclude_file.txt to exclude the items listed in it: $ tar -zcvf -X exclude_file.txt. Then we can add a list of file or directory names to be excluded, each separated by a newline: file1.txt Let’s see how to use an exclude file to ignore specific files and directories while archiving.įirst, we’ll create an exclude_file.txt file: $ touch exclude_file.txt

Alternatively, we can use this command to list the contents of the file without extracting it:Īlternatively, we can provide the tar command with a file containing the list of files or directories to exclude when creating or extracting archive files. Since we used the -v option, we can see from the output above that file1.txt was skipped. We got the message “file changed as we read it” because we created the file in the same directory that contains the items to be archived. When excluding directories, we shouldn’t use the trailing slash(/) at the end of the directory name. ” at the end of the command as the path to the current working directory containing the files we want to archive. –exclude: excludes file1.txt file when creating the archive.-f: allows us to specify a filename for the archive created.

-v: verbosely lists the files and directories processed.-z: compresses the files and directories using gzip.Let’s break down this command to understand it:

Mac compress folder excluding files