How to exclude a directory in find . command

If -prune doesn't work for you, this will:

find -name "*.js" -not -path "./directory/*"

Caveat: requires traversing all of the unwanted directories.

Use the -prune switch. For example, if you want to exclude the misc directory just add a -path ./misc -prune -o to your find command:

find . -path ./misc -prune -false -o -name '*.txt'

Here is an example with multiple directories:

find . -type d \( -path dir1 -o -path dir2 -o -path dir3 \) -prune -false -o -name '*.txt'

Here we exclude ./dir1, ./dir2 and ./dir3 in the current directory, since in find expressions it is an action that acts on the criteria -path dir1 -o -path dir2 -o -path dir3 (if dir1 or dir2 or dir3), ANDed with type -d.

To exclude directory name at any level, use -name:

find . -type d \( -name node_modules -o -name dir2 -o -path name \) -prune -false -o -name '*.json'

I find the following easier to reason about than other proposed solutions:

find build -not \( -path build/external -prune \) -name \*.js# you can also exclude multiple pathsfind build -not \( -path build/external -prune \) -not \( -path build/blog -prune \) -name \*.js

Important Note: the paths you type after -path must exactly match what find would print without the exclusion. If this sentence confuses you just make sure to use full paths through out the whole command like this: find /full/path/ -not \( -path /full/path/exclude/this -prune \) .... See note [1] if you'd like a better understanding.

Inside \( and \) is an expression that will match exactly build/external (see important note above), and will, on success, avoid traversing anything below. This is then grouped as a single expression with the escaped parenthesis, and prefixed with -not which will make find skip anything that was matched by that expression.

One might ask if adding -not will not make all other files hidden by -prune reappear, and the answer is no. The way -prune works is that anything that, once it is reached, the files below that directory are permanently ignored.

This comes from an actual use case, where I needed to call yui-compressor on some files generated by wintersmith, but leave out other files that need to be sent as-is.

Note [1]: If you want to exclude /tmp/foo/bar and you run find like this "find /tmp \(..." then you must specify -path /tmp/foo/bar. If on the other hand you run find like this cd /tmp; find . \(... then you must specify -path ./foo/bar.