Excluding a specific directory using a recursive ‘ls’

findlsrecursive

I've been using the following command to list the most recently updated files (recursively) within a specific directory and order by modification time: 

$ stat --printf="%y %n\n" $(ls -tr $(find * -type f))

However, within the hierarchy, there is one directory that is full of files that get updated on a near minute-by-minute basis, that makes the above command near useless for finding files outside of the offending directory.

I tried using the ls -I flag but to no avail:

$ stat --printf="%y %n\n" $(ls -trI 'bad-dir' $(find * -type f))

Is there a simple way of excluding a single/specific directory using the ls command? Or should I be pushing the search into the find command?

Best Answer

You don't need that extra ls -tr. This is equivalent to your command and faster:

find . -type f | xargs stat --printf="%y %n\n" | sort -n

Something like this will exclude a subdirectory of files:

find . -type f ! -path './directory/to/ignore/*' \
     | xargs stat --printf="%y %n\n" \
     | sort -n

This will still check every file, if you want to ignore an entire subdirectory use -prune. You'll have to reorder things slightly so that we don't find all the files first.

find . -path './directory/to/ignore' -prune -o -type f -print0 \
     | xargs -0 stat --printf="%y %n\n" \
     | sort -n

And in the interests in being as efficient as possible, the stat was redundant, given find is already accessing the file. So you're actually hitting the filesystem 2X with the find ... | stat ... approach so here's a more efficient method that has find doing all the work.

find . -path './directory/to/ignore' -prune -o -printf '%t %p\n' 
     | sort -n

To make this version work I've had to adapt the printf directives since stat and find use different ones for the various filesystem meta data.

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