All commands tested on Mac OS Monterey / Jul 02, 2024

How to create a tar archive excluding a specific filetype

Create a tar archive called my-directory.tar of a directory my-directory/ but excluding files of a specific filetype.

You can use this short tar command.

              
                  tar --exclude='*.svn' -cvf my-directory.tar my-directory/

Or this more verbose tar command.

              
                  tar --exclude='*.svn' --create --verbose --file my-directory.tar my-directory/

Replace the *.svn in the above examples with whatever file extension you need to prevent from being archived. Ie. *.git

Options explained

--exclude tells tar not to process files or directories that match the specified pattern
-c or --create tells tar to create a new archive
v or --verbosetells tar to produce verbose output
f or --filetells tar that the next parameter will be the tar file to create, extract, append to, list, etc.