The dump command in Unix/Linux is used to backup and restore file systems. You can exclude certain directories or files from a dump using the exclude option. Here’s how to do it:
dump -0u -f /path/to/backup-file /filesystem/to/backup -X /path/to/exclude-file
Here, the -X option is used to specify a file that lists directories or files to exclude from the backup. The file should contain one exclude pattern per line, using the same syntax as the find command. For example:
/home/user/logs
/home/user/tmp
*.log
*.tmp
This will exclude the logs and tmp directories in the user home directory, as well as all files with the extensions .log and .tmp.
You can also use the exclude option to exclude directories or files based on a pattern. For example, to exclude all directories named logs and all files with the extension .log, you can use:
dump -0u -f /path/to/backup-file /filesystem/to/backup -exclude '*logs' -exclude '*.log'
This will exclude any directory or file whose name ends with logs or has the extension .log.
Note that the exclude option is case-sensitive, and patterns are matched against the full path of each file or directory.