Exclude list of files from find

Question

If I have a list of filenames in a text file that I want to exclude when I run find, how can I do that? For example, I want to do something like:

fi         


        

Answer 1

Josh Jolly's grep solution works, but has O(N**2) complexity, making it too slow for long lists. If the lists are sorted first (O(N*log(N)) complexity), you can use comm, which has O(N) complexity:

find /dir -name '*.gz' |sort >everything_sorted
sort skip_files >skip_files_sorted
comm -23 everything_sorted skip_files_sorted | xargs . . . etc

man your computer's comm for details.