Shell command to tar directory excluding certain files/folders

Question

Is there a simple shell command/script that supports excluding certain files/folders from being archived?

I have a directory that need to be archived with a sub dire

Answer 1

You can use cpio(1) to create tar files. cpio takes the files to archive on stdin, so if you've already figured out the find command you want to use to select the files the archive, pipe it into cpio to create the tar file:

find ... | cpio -o -H ustar | gzip -c > archive.tar.gz