[SlugBug] directory copy

[Bill Best]

hi

possibly a lame-ish question but needs must and all that...

i'd like to recursively copy a directory's contents to a new location 
but excluding one particularly large sub-directory e.g.

/home/directory1
/home/directory1/subdirA
/home/directory1/subdirB
/home/directory1/subdirC
/home/directory1/subdirD

/home/directory2

i'd like to copy /home/directory1 to /home/directory2 but omitting 
/home/directory2/subdirC, for example.

perhaps i could do this:

tar cvf directory1 --exclude subdirC | tar -xvf /home/directory2

but my tests so far haven't worked.

bill