7Zip - Command Line : Exclude folder(s) by wildcard pattern?

Question

Any idea how to exclude a wild-carded path(s) from a command-line 7zip command?

I'm doing something like this:

7z.exe a -t7z archive.7z FolderToArchive\ -mx0

and would like to exclude any \bin\*.* or \obj\*.* folders found underneath "FolderToArchive".

To exclude files, you can use the -x parameter. The help file gives this example for using -x:

7z a -tzip archive.zip *.txt -x!temp.*

That's great for excluding a file. But, again, I would like to exclude a wildcard-specified folder. Under my "FolderToArchive" there are multiple folders, under those folders there may or may not be bin\ and obj\ folders. I would like to not include these in the archive.

I've tried patterns like

-x!bin\*
-x!bin\*.*
-x!\bin\*
-x!\bin\*.*
-x!\\bin\\*
-x!\\bin\\*.*

None seem to exclude the bin\ folder. Is this simply a limitation of 7zip?

Answer 1

To exclude the bin and obj folders recursively you can use the command:

7z.exe a -t7z archive.7z FolderToArchive\ -mx0 -xr!bin -xr!obj

Answer 2

To avoid bug, use -r or -xr carefully.

suppose you have directories like:

.\path1\path2\bin
.\path1\path2\src
.\path3\path4\path5\bin
.\path3\path4\path5\src

and run the command:

7z a -t7z archive.7z .\path1\path2 .\path3\path4\path5 -xr!bin

what you got in archive.7z:

.\path2\src
.\path5\src

That is, the .\path2\ and .\path5\ became the top folder in archive.7z, and both bin directories were excluded.

-x only support path/filename relative to the top folder in archive.

So, if you only want to exclude .\path1\path2\bin, but to include all the other 'bin' directories, the command should be like this:

7z a -t7z archive.7z .\path1\path2 .\path3\path4\path5 -x!path2\bin

I tried to use absolute path in -x, but never succeed.

---

Update:

There is an option -spf in 7z for Linux which works with absolute path.

According to Marco, -spf is also available on Windows from 7-zip 15.14

Answer 3

Based on @zhazha's answer and make it more clear about how to exclude sub folders exactly. On Windows 10, to backup a Visual Studio solution root folder:

D:\VS2019\Sln1

then:

//goto the parent of the root folder first which make thing clearer
//not sure what will happen if you go into the root folder
cd D:\VS2019
"<path-of-7z>\7z.exe" a -tzip -mx0 Sln1_backup.zip Sln1 -x!Sln1\.vs -x!Sln1\Debug -x!Sln1\Release -x!Sln1\lib -x!Sln1\Project1\x64 -x!Sln1\Project2\obj

Then you can be sure only the specified sub folders are excluded, for example Sln1\Project3\obj or Sln1\Project4\lib will not be excluded unintentionally. Works for the hidden huge .vs folder.

-mx0 means archive/no compression.