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 (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

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

^{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 5

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.}

---

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 6

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)