I want to create a GZIP compressed TAR archive containing the contents of /var/log, but excluding /var/log/messages file.
I tried tar -cvf var/log.tar var/log/ -x *.messages*, but got the error message:
tar: You may not specify more than one `-Acdtrux' or `--test-label' option
Any ideas on how to go about this? I'm pretty confident I can create the archive, just not sure how to exclude the /var/log/messages file.
The -x flag (short for --extract) tells tar to unpack an archive. The -c flag (short for --create) tells tar to create an archive. You're passing both flags, which is a contradiction. It looks like you probably want to use the --exclude flag instead of the -x flag, e.g.:
tar -cvf var/log.tar var/log --exclude='*.messages*'
tar -cvf log.tar /var/log --exclude=/var/log/messages and it worked like a charm.