11 thoughts on - Find With Exclude Directory

• Just grep it out.

  find . -print | grep -v digitalplatform

  -v excludes

• So:

  find / -print | grep -v digitalplatform | grep varnish

• Thanks. But what if I want to turn that statement into one that will delete everything it finds? I need to preserve the contents of that directory.

  As in : find / -path ‘/usr/local/digitalplatform/*’ -prune -o -name
  “*varnish*” -exec rm -rfv {} \;

  I’m thinking the grep -v would be a visual thing, but the above statement would delete everything including the varnish files in the digitalplatform directory.

• find / -print | grep -v digitalplatform | grep varnish | xargs rm

  But test this first – you don’t want to remove anything by accident.

• find / -path /usr/local/digitalplatform -prune -name \*varnish\* doesn’t work?

• Hal & Jack

  Both are perfect! Thanks

  [root@uszmpwsls014lb ~]# find / -print | grep -v digitalplatform | grep varnish
  /var/lib/varnish
  /var/lib/varnish/uszmpwsls014lb
  /var/lib/varnish/uszmpwsls014lb/_.vsl
  /var/lib/varnish/varnish_storage.bin
  /usr/lib64/libvarnish.so.1
  /usr/lib64/libvarnishapi.so.1.0.0
  /usr/lib64/libvarnishcompat.so.1.0.0
  /usr/lib64/libvarnishcompat.so.1
  /usr/lib64/libvarnishapi.so.1
  /usr/lib64/libvarnish.so.1.0.0
  /usr/share/doc/varnish-libs-2.0.6
  /usr/share/doc/varnish-libs-2.0.6/LICENSE

  [root@uszmpwsls014lb ~]# find / -name “*varnish*” | sed
  ‘/digitalplatform$/d’ | head -5
  find: /proc/4604: No such file or directory
  /var/lib/varnish
  /var/lib/varnish/varnish_storage.bin
  /usr/lib64/libvarnish.so.1
  /usr/lib64/libvarnishapi.so.1.0.0
  /usr/lib64/libvarnishcompat.so.1.0.0

  Brian, no that doesn’t work. It returns nothing.

  [root@uszmpwsls014lb ~]# find / -path /usr/local/digitalplatform -prune
  -name \*varnish\*
  [root@uszmpwsls014lb ~]#

  But that’s ok I think I’m all set with the above options.

  Thanks!
  Tim

• Try

  find / -path /usr/local/digitalplatform -prune -o name ‘*varnish*’ -print

  Without the explicit -print, find will implicitly add one e.g
  find / \( -path …. -o -name … \) -print

• it might work reasonably for this particular case, but you should note the limitations of such an approach. specifically this would exclude both
  /path/you/want/to/ignore/digitalplatform/varnish and
  /path/you/want/to/find/digitalplatform/varnish

  I’d also suggest using find / -name varnish, dropping the second grep and possibly using anchors with egrep to be very specific (e.g. | egrep
  -v “^/ignore/this/path|^/ignore/another/path”

• Why not copy the directory elsewhere, then delete the rest and move it back? You’d take a copy of it anyway, if it is important, right?

  Cheers,

  Cliff

• try something along the lines of:

  find / -regex ‘.*varnish.*’ ! -regex ‘/usr/local/digitalplatform/.*’

• don’t forget to escape that exclamation point if typing on bash.

  —
  Billy Crook • Network and Security Administrator • RiskAnalytics, LLC