How do I specify a wildcard string for the end/trailing of a folder

Getting Help
1

Question

I want to only match wildcard folders but not wildcard files.
**/*cache or even **cache works for folders prepended with cache
but
**/*cache*/ doesn’t work to match only folders because the trailing / is ignored
Is there anyway to get around this?

Reference

From Documentation https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/040_backup.html
A trailing / is ignored, a leading / anchors the pattern at the root directory. This means, /bin matches /bin/bash but does not match /usr/bin/restic.

2

Welcome here @Unequal8761 !

The ignore system makes no distinction between files and directories. The patterns you specify are checked against files and directories alike.

3

Does that mean restic checks the file path of every file in the provided directory regardless of exclude?

4

Some more context. I get error:

incomplete metadata for C:\ProgramData\Dropbox\Update\Log\DropboxUpdate.log-2025-04-20-05-45-16-090-12840:

even thought I have \ProgramData\Dropbox in my excludes

5

@Unequal8761, for that example your exclude should be C:\ProgramData\Dropbox so with the drive letter included.

Note that restic is case sensitive so also use the same case (I recommend all in uppercase) for the backup command drive letters..

1 Like
6

For my own sanity. I tested it.

7

@Unequal8761
since your original question was:

I want to only match wildcard folders but not wildcard files.

Can you help summarize your findings, if it helped anything towards your question?
Do I observe correctly that since there are 8 folders in your example tree, all green exclude combinations would work for you?