Why won't excluding a specific folder work while I'm making a .zip file?

Question

I want to make a zip file of a directory except a specific folder which is into it. Here is my command:

zip -r -x 'public/images/' tw.zip /var/www/html/m4/

I want to make a zip of this /var/www/html/m4/ except public/images/ folder which exists into it. But my command throws this error message:

zip error: Invalid command arguments (nothing to select from)

What's wrong and how can I fix it?

Solution

The zip man page says:

zip ... [zipfile [file ...]] [-xi list]

so, the zip file name and the path to the structure you want to compress should come before your exclude list.

This part of your command will not be applied correctly:

-x 'public/images/'

Because it does not specify files in the way zip recognises.

This will work:

zip -r my.zip /var/www/html/m4/ -x /var/www/html/m4/public/images/\*

• As you know, -r is recursive.
• -xis used to exclude (files),
• \ before * is used to avoid filename expansion by the shell; we leave that to zip.