Linux – Find command exclude files whose path match a certain pattern

linux

I have a find command that looks for files that was modified recently and outputs the date 

find /path/on/server -mtime -1 -name '*.js' -exec ls -l {} \;

I would like it to exclude any deeply nested folder that matches a certain pattern e.g. there are a number of folders that have a "statistics" directory and ".svn" directories. So i'd like to be able to say if the file that was modified yesterday is in a folder named statistics ignore it. Or perhaps not search for files in those folders at all.

Best Answer

You can use the -path and -prune command line parameters to do this

find /path/on/server -mtime -1 -o -path '*.svn' -prune -o -path '*statistics' \ 
-prune -o -exec ls -l {} \;

This has the advantage of not searching the directories that you want excluding.

Also note that your ls -l may not be doing what you expect as it will list the entire contents of directories that are passed to it so you will get some files listed multiple times.

From the comments ls -ld would be better.

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