Copy recursively but skip a file

[JDVyska]

Hey guys.

I'm learning my way around Ubuntu, but I'm puzzled on this one. I need to copy a directory (and all contents) with a couple exceptions. I figure I can accomplish this by piping either find or ls results to copy, but I have no idea what the line would look like.

To give an example, let's take something I'm currently trying to do:


sudo cp -r /home/guest /etc/guest.bak

I need the cp to skip "/home/guest/.gvfs". Any thoughts?

[scorp123]

I need the cp to skip "/home/guest/.gvfs". Any thoughts?
rsync -av --exclude=/home/guest/.gvfs --exclude=/some/other/file/here --exclude=/even/one/more/file/here /path/to/original/files /path/to/where/they/should/go

Please see "man rsync" for the manual and more details.