How to exclude/ignore hidden files and directories in a wildcard-embedded "find" search?

Question

Starting from (notice the wildcards before and after "some text")

find . -type f -name '*some text*'

how can one exclude/ignore all hidden files and directories?

I've already been googling for far too long, came across some -prune and ! (exclamation mark) parameters, but no fitting (and parsimonious) example which just worked.

Piping | to grep would be an option and I'd also welcome examples of that; but primarily I'm interested in a brief one-liner (or a couple of stand-alone one-liners, illustrating different ways of achieving the same command-line goal) just using find.

ps: Find files in linux and exclude specific directories seems closely related, but a) is not accepted yet and b) is related-but-different-and-distinct, but c) may provide inspiration and help pinpoint the confusion!

Edit

find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \) -type f -name "whatever", works. The regex looks for "anything, then a slash, then a dot, then anything" (i.e. all hidden files and folders including their subfolders), and the "!" negates the regex.

Answer 1

This prints all files that are descendants of your directory, skipping hidden files and directories:

find . -not -path '*/.*'

So if you're looking for a file with some text in its name, and you want to skip hidden files and directories, run:

find . -not -path '*/.*' -type f -name '*some text*'

Explanation:

The -path option runs checks a pattern against the entire path string. * is a wildcard, / is a directory separator, . is a dot (hidden filenames start with a dot on Linux), and * is another wildcard. -not means don't select files that match this test.

I don't think that find is smart enough to avoid recursively searching hidden directories in the previous command, so if you need speed, use -prune instead, like this:

 find . -type d -path '*/.*' -prune -o -not -name '.*' -type f -name '*some text*' -print

Answer 2

This is one of the few means of excludes dot-files that also works correctly on BSD, Mac and Linux:

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

• $PWD print the full path to the current directory so that the path does not start with ./
• -name ".*" -prune matches any files or directories that start with a dot and then don't descend
• -o -print means print the file name if the previous expression did not match anything. Using -print or -print0 causes all other expressions to not print by default.

Answer 3

find $DIR -not -path '*/\.*' -type f \( ! -iname ".*" \)

Excludes all hidden directories, and hidden files under $DIR

Answer 4

You don't have to use find for that. Just use globstar in shell it-self, like:

echo **/*foo*

or:

ls **/*foo*

where **/ represents any folder recursively and *foo* any file which has foo in its name.

By default using ls will print file names excluding hidden files and directories.

If you don't have globbing enabled, do it by shopt -s globstar.

^{Note: A new globbing option works in Bash 4, zsh and similar shells.}

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Example:

$ mkdir -vp a/b/c/d
mkdir: created directory 'a'
mkdir: created directory 'a/b'
mkdir: created directory 'a/b/c'
mkdir: created directory 'a/b/c/d'
$ touch a/b/c/d/foo a/b/c/d/bar  a/b/c/d/.foo_hidden a/b/c/d/foo_not_hidden
$ echo **/*foo*
a/b/c/d/foo  a/b/c/d/foo_not_hidden

Answer 5

@Flimm's answer is good, particularly because it prevents find from descending into hidden directories. I prefer this simplification:

Generally to exclude all hidden paths (regular files, directories, etc):

find <start-point> -path '*/.*' -prune -o <expression> -print

For example, using your working directory as the start point, and -name '*some text*' as the expression:

find . -path '*/.*' -prune -o -name '*some text*' -print

In contrast to what @Flimm's answer suggests, no hidden files or hidden directories is the simple case. The -path '*/.*' expression is true for any path (regular files, directories, etc) that has a . immediately after your file separator, /. So this line will prune both hidden files and directories.

Allowing hidden files while excluding hidden directories is the case that requires a further filter. This is where you would include -type d in the the expression being pruned.

find <start-point> -type d -path '*/.*' -prune -o <expression> -print 

For example:

find . -type d -path '*/.*' -prune -o -name '*some text*' -print

In this case -type d -path '*/.*' is true only for directories, and so only directories are pruned.

Answer 6

This usually works too

find * [expression]

Using * shell wildcard for input all paths from working directory, usually * wildcard doesn't expand to hidden files but this could be changed in the shell options. Example:

find /path/* -iname file -mtime -3

Answer 7

^{The answer I originally posted as an "edit" to my original question above:}

find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \) -type f -name "whatever", works. The regex looks for "anything, then a slash, then a dot, then anything" (i.e. all hidden files and folders including their subfolders), and the "!" negates the regex.

Answer 8

A variant on https://askubuntu.com/a/749708/321070

find  -name '.?*' -prune -o -print

Instead of setting the directory to a full path, instead filter out things that mat ch .?* - a literal dot, any character, and then 0 or more characters.

Answer 9

$ pwd
/home/victoria

$ find $(pwd) -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -path '*/\.*' | sort
/home/victoria/new
/home/victoria/new1
/home/victoria/new2
/home/victoria/new3
/home/victoria/new3.md
/home/victoria/new.md
/home/victoria/package.json
/home/victoria/Untitled Document 1
/home/victoria/Untitled Document 2

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -path '*/\.*' | sed 's/^\.\///g' | sort
new
new1
new2
new3
new3.md
new.md
package.json
Untitled Document 1
Untitled Document 2

Notes:

• . : current folder
• remove -maxdepth 1 to search recursively
• -type f : find files, not directories (d)
• -not -path '*/\.*' : do not return .hidden_files
• sed 's/^\.\///g' : remove the prepended ./ from the result list

Answer 10

This answer to a similar question, is the only one that gave me the same results I'd get if I went into each folder, and then did an ls. I had to add -type f for it to fully work.

find . -not -path '*/\.*' -type f

Answer 11

find can be unnecessarily slow in the case where the hidden folders contain lots of files.

tree -if --noreport produces results similar to find, but with hidden files and folders excluded by default.

You can use that with grep for a familiar solution, but tree also has built-in pattern matching: How do I use tree to show the path to filenames containing a particular string?.

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One big limitation here is that tree always lists the parent folder(s) on separate lines, which you probably wouldn't want if you're using this in a script. There's (surprisingly) no simple option to disable this.

However, you can remove those by using an intermediate JSON representation and the widely used jq utility. Simply append the following to the tree command: -J|jq -r '..|select(.type?=="file")|.name'

With this, we can fully solve the problem -- but using tree instead of find:

tree -f -P '*some text*' -J|jq -r '..|select(.type?=="file")|.name'

And remember that tree can be much faster than find when excluding hidden folders.

Answer 12

find has neat logic switches such as -and and -not you can use them to your advantage to find a matching file with two rules like so:

$ touch non_hidden_file.txt .hidden_file.txt somethings/.another_hidden_file.txt                                                 

$ find . -type f -name '*hidden_file*' -and \( -not -name ".*" \)                            
./non_hidden_file.txt

As you can see, find uses two rules -name '*hidden_file*' and -and \( -not -name ".*" \) to find those filenames that match both conditions - filename with hidden_file in it but without leading dot. Note the slashes in front of parenthesis - they are used to define parenthesis as find arguments rather defining a subshell (which is what parenthesis mean otherwise without slashes)