Documentation for exclude patterns needs improvements (more examples)

[ametzler]

Hello,

Output of restic version

restic 0.8.0
compiled with go1.9.2 on linux/amd64
Hello,
as a first time user I have a hard time finding out how exactly --exclude works. The docs are very terse.

Experimenting found the following specifics:
Matching is against a complete pathname component (subdirectory name or filename) (foo does not match xfoo, it matches /1/2/foo, /foo/1/2 and /1/foo/2.

Slashes require some care:
Trailing slashes are ignored. "file/" matches a file named "file"
A leading slash anchors the string, the top path component has to match. e.g. assuming we are backing up /tmp/xxx-input and want to exclude /tmp/xxx-input/foo/file2. ...

• These patterns work: tmp xxx-input foo file2 /tmp/xxx-input/foo/file2 /tmp/xxx-input/foo /tmp/xxx-input /tmp xxx-input/foo.
• These don't: /xxx-input /foo /file2 /xxx-input/foo

Is there anything else I have missed? I can try to come up with a patch for the docs, but only after my understanding has been improved. ;-)

[fd0]

Thanks for taking the time to report this. It's actually a duplicate of #396, there you can find several issues with examples. I haven't had the time yet to distill these into the docs.

I'm closing this issue as a duplicate.

[fd0]

Especially, #1005 has many examples.