Exclude list of files from find

Question

If I have a list of filenames in a text file that I want to exclude when I run find, how can I do that? For example, I want to do something like:

find /dir -name "*.gz" -exclude_from skip_files 

and get all the .gz files in /dir except for the files listed in skip_files. But find has no -exclude_from flag. How can I skip all the files in skip_files?

Answer 1

I don't think find has an option like this, you could build a command using printf and your exclude list:

find /dir -name "*.gz" $(printf "! -name %s " $(cat skip_files)) 

Which is the same as doing:

find /dir -name "*.gz" ! -name first_skip ! -name second_skip .... etc 

Alternatively you can pipe from find into grep:

find /dir -name "*.gz" | grep -vFf skip_files 

Answer 2

This is what i usually do to remove some files from the result (In this case i looked for all text files but wasn't interested in a bunch of valgrind memcheck reports we have here and there):

find . -type f -name '*.txt' ! -name '*mem*.txt' 

It seems to be working.