How to tar a directory but exlude a file

Question

I want to tar.gz a directory but want to exclude a big file? The is for intermediary extraction. Dump will be written to and will want to keep.

E.g tar -zcf remote_test.tar.gz mydir/* except tsung.dump

Answer 1

From man tar:

 --exclude=PATTERN
       exclude files, given as a PATTERN

So you can use

 tar -zcf remote_test.tar.gz --exclude=tsung.dump mydir/* 

Answer 2

There's an exclude option for tar. If you want to tar everything in mydir except a tsung.dump, the command would look like this:

$ tar -zcf remote_test.tar.gz --exclude='tsung.dump' mydir