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Consider this directory (and file) structure:

mkdir testone mkdir testtwo mkdir testone/.svn mkdir testtwo/.git touch testone/fileA touch testone/fileB touch testone/fileC touch testone/.svn/fileA1 touch testone/.svn/fileB1 touch testone/.svn/fileC1 touch testtwo/fileD touch testtwo/fileE touch testtwo/fileF touch testtwo/.git/fileD1 touch testtwo/.git/fileE1 touch testtwo/.git/fileF1

I would like to print/find all files which are in these two directories, but excluding those in the subdirectories .git and/or .svn. If I do this:

find test*

... then all the files get dumped regardless.

If I do this (as per, say, How to exclude/ignore hidden files and directories in a wildcard-embedded “find” search?):

$ find test* -path '.svn' -o -prune testone testtwo $ find test* -path '*/.svn/*' -o -prune testone testtwo

... then I get only the top-level directories dumped, and no filenames.

Is it possible to use find alone to perform a search/listing like this, without piping into grep (i.e. doing a find for all files, then: find test* | grep -v '\.svn' | grep -v '\.git'; which would also output the top-level directory names, which I don't need)?

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2 Answers 2

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Your find commands not saying what to do if the given path is not matched. If you want to exclude everything that starts with a dot, and print the rest try:

find test* -path '*/.*' -prune -o -print

so it'll prune anything that matches that path, and print anything that doesn't.

Example output:

testone testone/fileC testone/fileB testone/fileA testtwo testtwo/fileE testtwo/fileF testtwo/fileD

If you want to specifically exclude just .svn and .git but not other things that start with a dot you can do:

find test* \( -path '*/.svn' -o -path '*/.git' \) -prune -o -print

which for this example produces the same output

if you want to exclude the top level directories you can add -mindepth 1 like

find test* -mindepth 1 -path '*/.*' -prune -o -print

which gives

testone/fileC testone/fileB testone/fileA testtwo/fileE testtwo/fileF testtwo/fileD
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  • Many thanks @EricRenouf - that works great, I just had to add type f: ... -prune -o -type f -print so as to get rid of the top level directories... Cheers! Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 13:00
  • @sdaau that will get rid of the top level directories, but would also get rid of any subdirectories themselves if you had any. It may be what you want, but it will exclude more than just the top level directories by adding -type f Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 13:02
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As a complement to Eric's answer, find can accept the ! operator to invert predicates. There is also the -wholename test that will perform a match on the files including their paths. So you could write something like this:

find test* \( ! -wholename "*/.git/*" -a ! -wholename "*/.svn/*" \)
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