How do I exclude a folder when performing file operations i.e. cp, mv, rm and chown etc. in Linux

Question

How do you exclude a folder when performing file operations i.e. cp etc.

I would currently use the wild card * to apply file operation to all, but I need to exclude one single folder.

The command I'm actually wanting to use is chown to change the owner of all the files in a directory but I need to exclude one sub directory.

Answer 1

find dir_to_start -name dir_to_exclude -prune -o -print0 | xargs -0 chown owner

find dir_to_start -not -name "file_to_exclude"  -print0 | xargs -0 chown owner