Kevin Buchs wrote:
> I often find myself wanting to use find, but avoid searching any
> subdirectories called .snapshot, which contain our hourly online backups.
> My attempt below seems to fail, for find is trying to access subdirectories
> of .snapshot, for which I have no permission and I get the Permission denied
> messages (many). I wonder if there is some other trick to avoiding any
> traversal of .snapshot directories anywhere on the tree?
>
> find ! -path '*/\.snapshot/*' -iname windrv6.inf
Using -prune is a typical way.
find . -name .snapshot -prune -o -iname windrv6.inf
Bob
Documentation on -prune from the find manual.
-- Action: -prune
If the file is a directory, do not descend into it. The result is
true. For example, to skip the directory `src/emacs' and all
files and directories under it, and print the names of the other
files found:
find . -wholename './src/emacs' -prune -o -print
The above command will not print `./src/emacs' among its list of
results. This however is not due to the effect of the `-prune'
action (which only prevents further descent, it doesn't make sure
we ignore that item). Instead, this effect is due to the use of
`-o'. Since the left hand side of the "or" condition has
succeeded for `./src/emacs', it is not necessary to evaluate the
right-hand-side (`-print') at all for this particular file. If
you wanted to print that directory name you could use either an
extra `-print' action:
find . -wholename './src/emacs' -prune -print -o -print
or use the comma operator:
find . -wholename './src/emacs' -prune , -print
If the `-depth' option is in effect, the subdirectories will have
already been visited in any case. Hence `-prune' has no effect in
this case.
Because `-delete' implies `-depth', using `-prune' in combination
with `-delete' may well result in the deletion of more files than
you intended.
