Copy recursively, omit one subdirectory

[system_159]

Hello all, I have a directory on a text only machine that is 17GB that I have to transfer over to another machine. Unfortunately all I have to do it with is a 2GB flash drive. There's one subdirectory inside this directory that is 16GB, so if I could copy all the files/directories except this one it'd make it a lot easier(I could then go through and get only what I needed from it.

So if I've got a directory named "top" and it has ~100 files and ~20 sub directories, one of named "data" that is 16GB. How would I go about copying everything but "data"?

Kind of like this:

cp -r top -omit /data /mnt/usb/destination

if that makes any sense.
Thanks!

[vsemaska]

Use tar instead of cp because it has the --exclude option.

tar -cvf - --exclude top/data top | (cd /mnt/usb/destination; tar -xvf -)