Exclude a sub-directory using find

Question

I have directory structure like this

data
|___
   |
   abc
    |____incoming
   def
    |____incoming
    |____processed
   123
    |___incoming
   456
    |___i         


        

Answer 1

Just for the sake of documentation: You might have to dig deeper as there are many search'n'skip constellations (like I had to). It might turn out that prune is your friend while -not -path won't do what you expect.

So this is a valuable example of 15 find examples that exclude directories:

http://www.theunixschool.com/2012/07/find-command-15-examples-to-exclude.html

To link to the initial question, excluding finally worked for me like this:

find . -regex-type posix-extended -regex ".*def/incoming.*|.*456/incoming.*" -prune -o -print 

Then, if you wish to find one file and still exclude pathes, just add | grep myFile.txt.

It may depend also on your find version. I see:

$ find -version
GNU find version 4.2.27
Features enabled: D_TYPE O_NOFOLLOW(enabled) LEAF_OPTIMISATION SELINUX