CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxshellfind
Randomblue
Randomblue

Reputation: 116283

Search for files except in a given directory

I have a directory ./src with files. I would like to extract all .c files in it, except those .c files that are in ./src/test. I have tried variants of

find ./src -name "*.c" -and -not -name ./src/test

(inspired from here) but none have succeeded.

What am I doing wrong?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 259

Answers (3)

Hudson
Hudson

Reputation: 2061

You want -regex to match the entire path (-name only matches the filename in the current directory) and -prune to eliminate that part of the tree:

find ./src -regex '^./src/test$' -prune -o -name '*.c' -print0 | xargs -0 ....

find without -print0 is almost always a problem waiting to happen if someone creates a filename with a space in it (or worse a newline).

Upvotes: 2

Jonathan Leffler
Jonathan Leffler

Reputation: 753725

I'd use a grep -v post-filter, assuming you don't have newlines in your paths (spaces will be OK):

find ./src -name "*.c" | grep -v '/src/test/'

I think your trouble is that the -name looks at the last element of the path only, so a -name with slashes in it simply doesn't work.

If your version of find supports it, using -path in place of -name might work:

find ./src -name "*.c" -and -not -path './src/test/*'

Note the modified operand to -path.

Upvotes: 3

lukecampbell
lukecampbell

Reputation: 15256

Can you use grep ?

find ./src -name \*.c | grep -v ./src/test

Upvotes: 3

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