# No anchor support for xtrabackup tables-exclude regular expression?

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/no-anchor-support-for-xtrabackup-tables-exclude-regular-expression/7304>\
**Category:** Percona XtraBackup\
**Created:** [November 21, 2019, 9:31am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/no-anchor-support-for-xtrabackup-tables-exclude-regular-expression/7304 "2019-11-21T09:31:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![xgong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xgong](https://forums.percona.com/u/xgong)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2019, 9:31am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/no-anchor-support-for-xtrabackup-tables-exclude-regular-expression/7304/1 "2019-11-21T09:31:34Z")

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I create table “student”, “\_student”, “sduent\_suffix” three tables. if I invoke xtrabackup with --tables-exclude=“student”, it will exclude all three tables – which is right. however, invoke it with xtrabackup with --tables-exclude=“^\_student$”, if anchor is supported, it should ignore just “\_student” table and the other two should be backed up. The results is. All three is backed up — looks to me the regular expression is treat “^” and “$” as literally string instead of regular expression anchros

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**Author:** ![xgong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xgong](https://forums.percona.com/u/xgong)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2019, 10:17am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/no-anchor-support-for-xtrabackup-tables-exclude-regular-expression/7304/2 "2019-11-21T10:17:34Z")

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find the issue and ways to make it work as I want