Why does find . -not -name ".*" not exclude hidden files?

Question

I want to ignore all hidden files, but especially .git and .svn ones when searching (and later replacing) files, not I have found that the most basic way to exclude such hidden files described in many online tutorials doesn't work here.

find . -not -name ".*"

will also print hidden files.

The script I'm trying to write is

replace() {
    if [ -n "$3" ]; then expr="-name \"$3\""; fi
    find . -type f \( $expr -not -name ".*" \) -exec echo sed -i \'s/$1/$2/g\' {} \;
    unset expr
}

Answer 1

The thing is -not -name ".*" does match all files and directories that start with anything but "." - but it doesn't prune them from the search, so you'll get matches from inside hidden directories. To prune paths use -prune, i.e.:

find $PWD -name ".*" -prune -o -print

(I use $PWD because otherwise the start of the search "." would also be pruned and there would be no output)