[Sussex] Excluding hidden files and folders with find command

[Fay Zee]

Hi All,

I want to refine one of my pre-backup commands.

The following command deletes tilde files throughout my user 
directory: 

$ find /home/fay/ -name '*~' -exec rm '{}' ; -print

But I want to keep the potentially valuable backup files in the hidden

dot directories or in the root of the user directory (I might need 
those backups in case of corruption).

Examples of files that I want to exclude from the rm command are:

/home/fay/.bluefish/session~
/home/fay/.screenrc~

So I want to delete everything starting with '/home/fay/' EXCEPT 
anything starting with '/home/fay/.' so the character after the 
third slash mustn't be a dot.

I'm not sure what to feed the -name argument. This option looks at 
just a file name not its path name.

The first example file, named 'session~' doesn't begin with a dot but 
it's in a directory that begins with a dot.

Looking at the man find pages I see I need to follow a shell pattern. 
I looked at the entries for -name, -iname and -path but I'm no nearer.

On a different tack, although there isn't a whole directory tree I 
need to ignore this time, so -prune doesn't apply, I'd like help on 
this one too, please. In the interests of future searches, I would 
like to know how to use the find command when I want to exclude, say, 
two complete directories, "dir1" and "dir2" when searching for a 
filename containing the string 'form'. Would I have to type the -prune
once for each directory and what would the finished command look like?

 Best Regards,
Fay
East Grinstead Linux User Group
www.eglug.org.uk


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