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To avoid operating on files whose names match a particular pattern, use the --exclude or --exclude-from options.
The --exclude=pattern option prevents any file or member whose name matches the shell wildcard (pattern) from being operated on. For example, to create an archive with all the contents of the directory src except for files whose names end in .o, use the command ‘tar -cf src.tar --exclude='*.o' src’.
You may give multiple --exclude options.
Use the --exclude-from option to read a list of patterns, one per line, from file; tar will ignore files matching those patterns. Thus if tar is called as ‘tar -c -X foo .’ and the file foo contains a single line *.o, no files whose names end in .o will be added to the archive.
When creating an archive, the --exclude-caches option causes tar to exclude all directories that contain a cache directory tag. A cache directory tag is a short file with the well-known name CACHEDIR.TAG and having a standard header specified in http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/spec.html. Various applications write cache directory tags into directories they use to hold regenerable, non-precious data, so that such data can be more easily excluded from backups.