[Sussex] Excluding hidden files and folders with find command

[Dominic Humphries]

On Tue, 2011-09-20 at 14:32 +0100, Fay Zee wrote:
> Hi Dominic,
> Yes, that works perfectly, and it makes perfect sense now I see the 
> command. Thanks so much :-)

No problem!

> Here, I've done some testing and there is a scenario I didn't 
> properly explain.
> 
> So these are my test files:
> 
> /home/fay/Downloads/dokuwiki/loads-of-files-containing-listit.txt
> /home/fay/Documents/what_to_buy/listit/testlistit.html
> /home/fay/Documents/what_to_buy/listit/webcam.html
> /home/fay/listit/january_listit.txt
> 
> I want to exclude the 'Downloads' folder and 'listit' which is a sub 
> sub folder in another folder.
> I only want to return the single result 'testlistit.html'.

> $ find . -name '*listit*' | grep -v 'Downloads' | grep -v 'listit'
> 
> Returns nothing of course.
> 
> $ ls -l `find . -name '*listit*' | grep -v 'Downloads' | grep -v
> 'listit'`
> 
> What I don't understand about this command is that it just returns an 
> alphabetised list of the root folders and files inside /home/fay

This is because the command enclosed in backticks returns nothing, so
the above is basically the same as 'ls -l' which will default to your
current directory.

It looks like 
$ find . -name '*listit*' | grep -v 'Downloads' | grep -v '/home/fay/listit/'

would be the 'find' command you want, given the above scenario.

Dominic