.\" Man page generated from reStructuredText. . . .nr rst2man-indent-level 0 . .de1 rstReportMargin \\$1 \\n[an-margin] level \\n[rst2man-indent-level] level margin: \\n[rst2man-indent\\n[rst2man-indent-level]] - \\n[rst2man-indent0] \\n[rst2man-indent1] \\n[rst2man-indent2] .. .de1 INDENT .\" .rstReportMargin pre: . RS \\$1 . nr rst2man-indent\\n[rst2man-indent-level] \\n[an-margin] . nr rst2man-indent-level +1 .\" .rstReportMargin post: .. .de UNINDENT . RE .\" indent \\n[an-margin] .\" old: \\n[rst2man-indent\\n[rst2man-indent-level]] .nr rst2man-indent-level -1 .\" new: \\n[rst2man-indent\\n[rst2man-indent-level]] .in \\n[rst2man-indent\\n[rst2man-indent-level]]u .. .TH "BORG-PATTERNS" 1 "2023-03-22" "" "borg backup tool" .SH NAME borg-patterns \- Details regarding patterns .SH DESCRIPTION .sp The path/filenames used as input for the pattern matching start from the currently active recursion root. You usually give the recursion root(s) when invoking borg and these can be either relative or absolute paths. .sp If you give \fI/absolute/\fP as root, the paths going into the matcher will look relative like \fIabsolute/.../file.ext\fP, because file paths in Borg archives are always stored normalized and relative. This means that e.g. \fBborg create /path/to/repo ../some/path\fP will store all files as \fIsome/path/.../file.ext\fP and \fBborg create /path/to/repo /home/user\fP will store all files as \fIhome/user/.../file.ext\fP\&. .sp A directory exclusion pattern can end either with or without a slash (\(aq/\(aq). If it ends with a slash, such as \fIsome/path/\fP, the directory will be included but not its content. If it does not end with a slash, such as \fIsome/path\fP, both the directory and content will be excluded. .sp File patterns support these styles: fnmatch, shell, regular expressions, path prefixes and path full\-matches. By default, fnmatch is used for \fB\-\-exclude\fP patterns and shell\-style is used for the \fB\-\-pattern\fP option. For commands that support patterns in their \fBPATH\fP argument like (\fBborg list\fP), the default pattern is path prefix. .sp Starting with Borg 1.2, discovered fs paths are normalised, have leading slashes removed and then are matched against your patterns. Note: You need to review your include / exclude patterns and make sure they do not expect leading slashes. Borg can only deal with this for some very simple patterns by removing leading slashes there also. .sp If followed by a colon (\(aq:\(aq) 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. \fIaa:something/*\fP). .INDENT 0.0 .TP .B \fI\%Fnmatch\fP, selector \fIfm:\fP This is the default style for \fB\-\-exclude\fP and \fB\-\-exclude\-from\fP\&. These patterns use a variant of shell pattern syntax, with \(aq*\(aq matching any number of characters, \(aq?\(aq matching any single character, \(aq[...]\(aq matching any single character specified, including ranges, and \(aq[!...]\(aq matching any character not specified. For the purpose of these patterns, the path separator (backslash for Windows and \(aq/\(aq on other systems) is not treated specially. Wrap meta\-characters in brackets for a literal match (i.e. \fI[?]\fP to match the literal character \fI?\fP). For a path to match a pattern, the full path must match, or it must match from the start of the full path 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 \(aq*\(aq is appended before matching is attempted. A leading path separator is always removed. .TP .B Shell\-style patterns, selector \fIsh:\fP This is the default style for \fB\-\-pattern\fP and \fB\-\-patterns\-from\fP\&. Like fnmatch patterns these are similar to shell patterns. The difference is that the pattern may include \fI**/\fP for matching zero or more directory levels, \fI*\fP for matching zero or more arbitrary characters with the exception of any path separator. A leading path separator is always removed. .TP .B Regular expressions, selector \fIre:\fP Regular expressions similar to those found in Perl are supported. Unlike shell patterns regular expressions are not required to match the full path and any substring match is sufficient. It is strongly recommended to anchor patterns to the start (\(aq^\(aq), to the end (\(aq$\(aq) or both. Path separators (backslash for Windows and \(aq/\(aq on other systems) in paths are always normalized to a forward slash (\(aq/\(aq) before applying a pattern. The regular expression syntax is described in the \fI\%Python documentation for the re module\fP\&. .TP .B Path prefix, selector \fIpp:\fP This pattern style is useful to match whole sub\-directories. The pattern \fIpp:root/somedir\fP matches \fIroot/somedir\fP and everything therein. A leading path separator is always removed. .TP .B Path full\-match, selector \fIpf:\fP This pattern style is (only) useful to match full paths. This is kind of a pseudo pattern as it can not have any variable or unspecified parts \- the full path must be given. \fIpf:root/file.ext\fP matches \fIroot/file.ext\fP only. A leading path separator is always removed. .sp Implementation note: this is implemented via very time\-efficient O(1) hashtable lookups (this means you can have huge amounts of such patterns without impacting performance much). Due to that, this kind of pattern does not respect any context or order. If you use such a pattern to include a file, it will always be included (if the directory recursion encounters it). Other include/exclude patterns that would normally match will be ignored. Same logic applies for exclude. .UNINDENT .sp \fBNOTE:\fP .INDENT 0.0 .INDENT 3.5 \fIre:\fP, \fIsh:\fP and \fIfm:\fP patterns are all implemented on top of the Python SRE engine. It is very easy to formulate patterns for each of these types which requires an inordinate amount of time to match paths. If untrusted users are able to supply patterns, ensure they cannot supply \fIre:\fP patterns. Further, ensure that \fIsh:\fP and \fIfm:\fP patterns only contain a handful of wildcards at most. .UNINDENT .UNINDENT .sp Exclusions can be passed via the command line option \fB\-\-exclude\fP\&. When used from within a shell, the patterns should be quoted to protect them from expansion. .sp The \fB\-\-exclude\-from\fP option permits loading exclusion patterns from a text file with one pattern per line. Lines empty or starting with the number sign (\(aq#\(aq) 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. .sp To test your exclusion patterns without performing an actual backup you can run \fBborg create \-\-list \-\-dry\-run ...\fP\&. .sp Examples: .INDENT 0.0 .INDENT 3.5 .sp .nf .ft C # Exclude \(aq/home/user/file.o\(aq but not \(aq/home/user/file.odt\(aq: $ borg create \-e \(aq*.o\(aq backup / # Exclude \(aq/home/user/junk\(aq and \(aq/home/user/subdir/junk\(aq but # not \(aq/home/user/importantjunk\(aq or \(aq/etc/junk\(aq: $ borg create \-e \(aqhome/*/junk\(aq backup / # Exclude the contents of \(aq/home/user/cache\(aq but not the directory itself: $ borg create \-e home/user/cache/ backup / # The file \(aq/home/user/cache/important\(aq is *not* backed up: $ borg create \-e home/user/cache/ backup / /home/user/cache/important # The contents of directories in \(aq/home\(aq are not backed up when their name # ends in \(aq.tmp\(aq $ borg create \-\-exclude \(aqre:^home/[^/]+\e.tmp/\(aq backup / # Load exclusions from file $ cat >exclude.txt <