Exclude range of directories in find command

You can use wildcards in the pattern for the option -not -path:

find ./ -type f -name "*.bz2" -not -path "./0*/*" -not -path "./1*/*

this will exclude all directories starting with 0 or 1. Or even better:

find ./ -type f -name "*.bz2" -not -path "./[01]*/*"

Firstly, you can help find by using -prune rather than -not -path - that will avoid even looking inside the relevant directories.

To your main point - you can build a wildcard for your example (numeric 01 to 19):

find . -path './0[1-9]' -prune -o -path './1[0-9]' -prune -o -print

If your range is less convenient (e.g. 05 to 25) you might want to build the range into a bash variable, then interpolate that into the find command:

a=("-path ./"{05..25}" -prune -o")find . ${a[*]} -print -prune

(you might want to echo "${a[*]}" or printf '%s\n' ${a[*]} to see how it's working)

For me, I found the find command as a standalone tool somehow cumbersome. Therefore, I always end up using a combination of find just for the recursive file search and grep to make the actual exculsion/inclusion stuff. Finally I hand over the results to a third command which will perform the actions, like rm to remove files for example.

My generic command would look something like this:

find [root-path] | grep (-v)? -E "cond1|cond2|...|condN" | [action-performing-tool] 

• root-path is where to start the search recursively
• add -v option is used to invert the matching results.
• cond1 - condN, the conditions for the matching. When -v is involed then this are the conditions to not match.
• the action-performing-tool does the actual work

For example you want to remove all files not matching some conditions in the current directory:

find . -not -name "\." | grep -v -E "cond1|cond2|cond3|...|condN" | xargs rm -rf

As you can see, we are searching in the current directory indicated by the dot as root-path: then we want to invert the matching results, because we want all files not matching our conditions: and finally we pass all files found to rm in order to delete them: I add -rf to recursive/force delete all files. I used the find command with -not -name "." to exclude the current directory indicated normally by dot.

For the actuall question: Assume we have a directory using .git and .metadata directory and we want to exclude them in our search:

find . -not -name "\." | grep -v -E ".git|.metadata" | [action-performing-tool]

Hope that helps!