Use find command but exclude files in two directories

Question

I want to find files that end with _peaks.bed, but exclude files in the tmp and scripts folders.

My command is like this:

 find . -type f \( -name "*_peaks.bed" ! -name "*tmp*" ! -name "*scripts*" \) 

But it didn't work. The files in tmp and script folder will still be displayed.

Does anyone have ideas about this?

Answer 1

Here's how you can specify that with find:

find . -type f -name "*_peaks.bed" ! -path "./tmp/*" ! -path "./scripts/*" 

Explanation:

• find . - Start find from current working directory (recursively by default)
• -type f - Specify to find that you only want files in the results
• -name "*_peaks.bed" - Look for files with the name ending in _peaks.bed
• ! -path "./tmp/*" - Exclude all results whose path starts with ./tmp/
• ! -path "./scripts/*" - Also exclude all results whose path starts with ./scripts/

Testing the Solution:

$ mkdir a b c d e $ touch a/1 b/2 c/3 d/4 e/5 e/a e/b $ find . -type f ! -path "./a/*" ! -path "./b/*"  ./d/4 ./c/3 ./e/a ./e/b ./e/5 

You were pretty close, the -name option only considers the basename, where as -path considers the entire path =)

Answer 2

Here is one way you could do it...

find . -type f -name "*_peaks.bed" | egrep -v "^(./tmp/|./scripts/)"