Exclude node_modules in timemachine

command.sh

find `pwd` -type d -maxdepth 3 -name 'node_modules' | xargs -n 1 tmutil addexclusion

This thread shows up fairly high in my searches for excluding python virtualenvs from timemachine.

Just wanted to point out for folks looking to dig a little deeper that there is some good info out there on the xattr that's being set on the item leading to exclusion, including faster ways to find these files (with mdfind -- though this will skip files that are not indexed by spotlight) and likely some other opportunities to set the attribute directly with xattr if desired:

• https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/25833/27415
• https://www.heissenberger.at/en/blog/macos-exclude-node_modules-folder-from-time-machine/

Also, it appears that tmutil addexclusion supports multiple args:

$ mkdir -p {foo,bar}
$ ls
bar  foo
$ xattr *
$
$ tmutil addexclusion ./foo ./bar
$ xattr *
bar: com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem
foo: com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem

which means that many of the above commands could probably be done much more efficiently with find ... -exec tmutil addexclusion {} +, which collects arguments and runs the command once with collected arguments, as opposed to \; or piping to xargs / parallel, which will be separate invocations of tmutil.

EDIT: The equivalent for fd is --exec-batch

i was searching for a solution and this helped me a lot so im gonna drop a little here.

for fish and showing logs for what you're adding

find . -type d -maxdepth 3 -name 'node_modules' | while read -l line
     echo "Excluding: $line"
     tmutil addexclusion "$line"
end

and to check what you added

find . -type d -maxdepth 3 -name 'node_modules' | while read -l line
    tmutil isexcluded "$line"
end