<html><body>Hi All,<br /><br />I want to refine one of my pre-backup commands.<br /><br />The following command deletes tilde files throughout my user <br />directory: <br /><br />$ find /home/fay/ -name '*~' -exec rm '{}' \; -print<br /><br />But I want to keep the potentially valuable backup files in the hidden <br />dot directories or in the root of the user directory (I might need <br />those backups in case of corruption)<br /><br />Examples of files that I want to exclude from the rm command are:<br /><br />/home/fay/.bluefish/session~<br />/home/fay/.screenrc~<br /><br />So I want to delete everything starting with '/home/fay/' EXCEPT <br />anything starting with '/home/fay/.' so the character after the <br />third slash mustn't be a dot.<br /><br />I'm not sure what to feed the -name argument. This option looks at <br />just a file name not its path name.<br /><br />The first example file, named 'session~' doesn't begin with a dot but <br />it's in a directory that begins with a dot.<br /><br />Looking at the man find pages I see I need to follow a shell pattern. <br />I looked at the entries for -name, -iname and -path but I'm no nearer.<br /><br /><br /><br />On a different tack, although there isn't a whole directory tree I <br />need to ignore this time, so -prune doesn't apply, I'd like help on <br />this one too, please. In the interests of future searches, I would <br />like to know how to use the find command when I want to exclude, say, <br />two complete directories, "dir1" and "dir2" when searching for a <br />filename containing the string 'form'. Would I have to type the -prune<br />once for each directory and what would the finished command look like?<br /><br /><br />
Best Regards,<br />Fay<br />East Grinstead Linux User Group<br />www.eglug.org.uk<br /><br /></body></html>