How to exclude a directory in find . command

Question

I\'m trying to run a find command for all JavaScript files, but how do I exclude a specific directory?

Here is the find code we\'re using.<

Answer 1

To exclude multiple directories:

find . -name '*.js' -not \( -path "./dir1" -o -path "./dir2/*" \)

To add directories, add -o -path "./dirname/*":

find . -name '*.js' -not \( -path "./dir1" -o -path "./dir2/*" -o -path "./dir3/*"\)

But maybe you should use a regular expression, if there are many directories to exclude.

Answer 2

One option would be to exclude all results that contain the directory name with grep. For example:

find . -name '*.js' | grep -v excludeddir

Answer 3

This is suitable for me on a Mac:

find . -name *.php -or -path "./vendor" -prune -or -path "./app/cache" -prune

It will exclude vendor and app/cache dir for search name which suffixed with php.

Answer 4

For what I needed it worked like this, finding landscape.jpg in all server starting from root and excluding the search in /var directory:

find / -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep -v /var | xargs -I '{}' find '{}' -name landscape.jpg

find / -maxdepth 1 -type d lists all directories in /

grep -v /var excludes `/var' from the list

xargs -I '{}' find '{}' -name landscape.jpg execute any command, like find with each directory/result from list

Answer 5

I prefer the -not notation ... it's more readable:

find . -name '*.js' -and -not -path directory

Answer 6

You can also use regular expressions to include / exclude some files /dirs your search using something like this:

find . -regextype posix-egrep -regex ".*\.(js|vue|s?css|php|html|json)$" -and -not -regex ".*/(node_modules|vendor)/.*" 

This will only give you all js, vue, css, etc files but excluding all files in the node_modules and vendor folders.