Unix & Linux Asked by Pompy on December 8, 2020
i want to exclude one directory from the find search tree. .aaa
is a hidden sub-directory in the current directory. I want to exclude aaa_rc_bbb, xxx_rc_xxx
and many more sub-directories containing rc
in their names. But it still not ignoring and giving me results containing rc
sub-directories. Its as if *rc*
wildcard is not working.
find -L /students/projects/myname/ -name .aaa -prune -o -path */*/class_project/*/*/pikachu/*/*/*rc*/ -prune -o -path */*/class_project/*/*/pikachu/*/*/bambi/bambi.txt | head -n50 | xargs ls
.
Also, i want find to search only in this path : */*/class_project/*/*/pikachu/*/*/bambi/bambi.txt
Please help me. Am i doing anything wrong?
Your -path
pattern ends with a slash. No pathname that find
examines will ever end in a slash, so the pattern will never match anything.
To prune any directory called .aaa
and any directory with rc
in its name:
find -L /students/projects/myname
-type d '(' -name '.aaa' -o -name '*rc*' ')' -prune -o -print
To only look at the path */*/class_project/*/*/pikachu/*/*/bambi/bambi.txt
:
find -L /students/projects/myname
-type d '(' -name '.aaa' -o -name '*rc*' ')' -prune -o
-path '*/*/class_project/*/*/pikachu/*/*/bambi/bambi.txt' -print
This assumes that bambi.txt
is located in
/students/projects/myname/*/*/class_project/*/*/pikachu/*/*/bambi/bambi.txt
Note the quoting of the patterns in the find
command. Without quotes, the shell would try to expand the patterns to lists of pathnames before calling find
, possibly resulting in confusing find
, or with some shells, an error.
Answered by Kusalananda on December 8, 2020
The first issue is that you have unquoted globs (*
). All those paths should be surrounded with single quotes, e.g. '*/*/class_project/*/*/pikachu/*/*/bambi/bambi.txt'
. This prevents the shell from expanding the wildcards before they get passed to find
.
Next, you need the -prune
sub-expression to occur before the main search sub-expression. BTW, you can combine all the names into a compound expression with a single -prune
like this:
find ( ( -name '*foo*' -o -name '*bar*' ) -a -prune ) -o ( -name baz -a -print )
This means I want to find files named baz
while excluding any files/directories containing foo
or bar
in their names.
Some notes:
-a
(AND) operator and the parentheses so there is no ambiguity.
so they are not interpreted by the shell before being passed to find
.-name
tests but any other tests (e.g. -path
) can be in the first nested set of parentheses. Any file/dir matching any of the tests will be pruned and thus not applied to the next tests (in the last set of parens).-print
action to distinguish it from the -prune
part.For clarity let's rewrite this in a more common expression style:
((name=='*foo*' OR name=='*bar*') AND prune) OR (name==bar AND print)
or even
if (name=='*foo*' OR name=='*bar*')
prune
else if (name==bar)
print
fi
Now given normal precedence rules and that the default boolean operator is -a
we can reduce the example down to:
find ( -name '*foo*' -o -name '*bar*' ) -prune -o -name baz -print
Turning to your command, the paths that find
constructs for the files it discovers will never end in /
characters, so -path '*/*/class_project/*/*/pikachu/*/*/*rc*/'
could never possibly match. You'd need to drop that trailing /
and possibly add a -type d
if you want to restrict to files of type directory.
Also note that */*
as a pattern matches on any string that contains a /
, that also includes foo/bar/baz
. Here, your paths all start with /students/projects/myname/
so the /
in */*
is redundant as we know already that that /
will be there.
If I'm reading your intent correctly you don't have any tests for the second sub-expression, i.e. if a file doesn't get pruned you want to print it. So that leads to
find -L /students/projects/myname/
(
-name .aaa
-o -path '*/class_project/*/*/pikachu/*/*/*rc*'
-o -path '*/class_project/*/*/pikachu/*/*/bambi/bambi.txt'
) -prune
-o -print
Answered by B Layer on December 8, 2020
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