borg/docs/usage/help.rst.inc

.. _borg_patterns:

borg help patterns
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
::


Exclusion patterns support four separate styles, fnmatch, shell, regular
expressions and path prefixes. If followed by a colon (':') the first two
characters of a pattern are used as a style selector. Explicit style
selection is necessary when a non-default style is desired or when the
desired pattern starts with two alphanumeric characters followed by a colon
(i.e. `aa:something/*`).

`Fnmatch <https://docs.python.org/3/library/fnmatch.html>`_, selector `fm:`

    These patterns use a variant of shell pattern syntax, with '*' matching
    any number of characters, '?' matching any single character, '[...]'
    matching any single character specified, including ranges, and '[!...]'
    matching any character not specified. For the purpose of these patterns,
    the path separator ('\' for Windows and '/' on other systems) is not
    treated specially. Wrap meta-characters in brackets for a literal match
    (i.e. `[?]` to match the literal character `?`). For a path to match
    a pattern, it must completely match from start to end, or must match from
    the start to just before a path separator. Except for the root path,
    paths will never end in the path separator when matching is attempted.
    Thus, if a given pattern ends in a path separator, a '*' is appended
    before matching is attempted.

Shell-style patterns, selector `sh:`

    Like fnmatch patterns these are similar to shell patterns. The difference
    is that the pattern may include `**/` for matching zero or more directory
    levels, `*` for matching zero or more arbitrary characters with the
    exception of any path separator.

Regular expressions, selector `re:`

    Regular expressions similar to those found in Perl are supported. Unlike
    shell patterns regular expressions are not required to match the complete
    path and any substring match is sufficient. It is strongly recommended to
    anchor patterns to the start ('^'), to the end ('$') or both. Path
    separators ('\' for Windows and '/' on other systems) in paths are
    always normalized to a forward slash ('/') before applying a pattern. The
    regular expression syntax is described in the `Python documentation for
    the re module <https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html>`_.

Prefix path, selector `pp:`

    This pattern style is useful to match whole sub-directories. The pattern
    `pp:/data/bar` matches `/data/bar` and everything therein.

Exclusions can be passed via the command line option `--exclude`. When used
from within a shell the patterns should be quoted to protect them from
expansion.

The `--exclude-from` option permits loading exclusion patterns from a text
file with one pattern per line. Lines empty or starting with the number sign
('#') after removing whitespace on both ends are ignored. The optional style
selector prefix is also supported for patterns loaded from a file. Due to
whitespace removal paths with whitespace at the beginning or end can only be
excluded using regular expressions.

Examples:

# Exclude '/home/user/file.o' but not '/home/user/file.odt':
$ borg create -e '*.o' backup /

# Exclude '/home/user/junk' and '/home/user/subdir/junk' but
# not '/home/user/importantjunk' or '/etc/junk':
$ borg create -e '/home/*/junk' backup /

# Exclude the contents of '/home/user/cache' but not the directory itself:
$ borg create -e /home/user/cache/ backup /

# The file '/home/user/cache/important' is *not* backed up:
$ borg create -e /home/user/cache/ backup / /home/user/cache/important

# The contents of directories in '/home' are not backed up when their name
# ends in '.tmp'
$ borg create --exclude 're:^/home/[^/]+\.tmp/' backup /

# Load exclusions from file
$ cat >exclude.txt <<EOF
# Comment line
/home/*/junk
*.tmp
fm:aa:something/*
re:^/home/[^/]\.tmp/
sh:/home/*/.thumbnails
EOF
$ borg create --exclude-from exclude.txt backup /