Bash – Recursive find that does not find hidden files or recurse into hidden dirs

bashfind

I am wanting to search recursively through a directory and find all files that are not hidden files themselves and are not in a hidden dir. I tried using find . -type f -not -name '.*' which excludes any base name hidden files, but it still recurses into hidden directories.

dir/
   file.py
   .hidden_file
   .hidden_dir/
      file.c

I would want the output to be:

./dir/file.py

however, I get:

./dir/file.py
./dir/.hidden_dir/file.c

EDIT:
I would like to list only files, i.e., -type f

Best Answer

You'll have to "prune" the directories you don't want to recurse into:

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

Usually -prune is used with -o because it returns true, so when combined with short-circuit OR, it has the effect of skipping the -print on hidden files / directories, which is exactly what you want.

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Grep Command – Find All .tex Files in Directories Recursively

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$ find . -type l -name "Math*" -print0 |
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Bash – Listing number of files in each folder where folder name matches a pattern

There are two main ways of solving this:

Modify the find command so that it only enters the directories that you are interested in and then prints a single character (e.g. x) for each found file within. Then count the number of that character produced with wc -l. It's safer to output a character than the pathname as pathnames in Unix could potentially contain newlines. This solution is a bit tricky as it involves using -prune to ignore directories we're not interested in, or alternatively ! -path.
Find the directories just like you've done so far, but then use an in-line script to do the counting of files within. This is simpler, and what I'm showing below.

find /path/to/cool/stuff -maxdepth 4 -type d -name "*Magic Data*' \
    -exec bash -O dotglob -c '
        dir=$1
        set -- "$dir"/*
        printf "%s %d\n" "$dir" "$#"' bash {} ';'

Here, we find the directories like you do, then, for each directory, we run this short bash script:

dir=$1
set -- "$dir"/*
printf "%s %d\n" "$dir" "$#"

This takes the pathname of the directory from the command line (given by find), and expands the * glob pattern within it. By setting the dotglob shell option on the command line for the script, we are guaranteed to also count hidden files and directories (remove -O dotglob to not count hidden names).

We do the expansion of all names as an argument to set, which will set the positional parameters to the expanded entries. The number of positional parameters is available as $#, which is therefore also the count of files in that particular directory.

Understanding the -exec option of `find`

Best Answer

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