Ubuntu – How to filter out hidden files and directories in ‘find’

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 (it has to be escaped to avoid special meaning), 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

Simply loop over each line of dpkg -L elixir and test whether the line is the path of a regular file, then echo it:

while read f; do [ -f "$f" ] && echo "$f"; done < <(dpkg -L elixir)

Your idea with find looks good but find

1. does not accept stdin and
2. searches in the given path while you want to just check properties of the single given path,

so it’s not the right tool here.