Exclude Certain Files When Creating A Tarball Using Tar Command

How can I keep out certain files when creating a tarball? For example:

/home/me/file1
/home/me/dir1
/home/me/dir2
/home/me/abc
/home/me/xyz

How do I execute zyz and abc file while using a tar command?

The GNU version of the tar archiving utility has --exclude and -X options. So to exclude abc and xyz file you need to type the command as follows:
$ tar -zcvf /tmp/mybackup.tar.gz --exclude='abc' --exclude='xyz' /home/me
If you have more than 2 files use -X option to specify multiple file names. It reads list of exclude file names from a text file. For example create a file called exclude.txt:
$ vi exclude.txtAppend file names:
abc
xyz
*.bak

Save and close the file. This lists the file patterns that need to be excluded. Now type the command:
$ tar -zcvf /tmp/mybackup.tar.gz -X exclude.txt /home/me
Where,

• -X file.txt :exclude files matching patterns listed in FILE file.txt