find: exclude n different directories and m different files present at any level but include few files from some excluded directories

Question

I want to recursively find all directories and files inside a path but want to exclude some other directories and files that match given patterns. I then want to execute further commands on the search result, maybe cp, mv, rsync or rm the result of find.

Suppose I want to prune entire node_modules, .git and build directory and also prune enhancers directory but would like to include in the search result a file with -name xyz.js that is present at unknown depth inside the enhancers directory.

With the command below I am able to achieve the desired result except include xyz.js file in the search result. The command is very long.

find . -path "./node_modules" -prune -o -path "./.git*" -prune -o -path "./build" -prune -o -path "*/enhancers" -prune -o -print | grep 'xyz.js'

--root
  |--node_modules
  |--public
  |--build
  |--.git
  |--.gitignore
  |--.env
  |--package.json
  |--src
    |--history
    |--store
      |--middleware
        |..
        |..
          |--enhancers
            |..
              |--xyz.js

In the schematic directory structure above |.. stands for unknown depth(level) inside the directory.

In the shown directory structure, I want to include all the files in the search result except,

• the entire node_modules directory
• entire .git directory
• .gitignore file
• entire enhancers directory, but include xyz.js file in search result

Is there a shorter way to do it? Major confusion is between regexp and glob patterns.

If I substitute ./.git* with ./\.git*, then also it works.

If I use more than one * in */enhancers, then also it works.

What pattern rules to search for files and directories are applicable in find command?

Answer 1

If you want to be able to find any file inside enhancers, then you can't prune it. prune means find not descending in it at all so there's no chance it can find files in there. Here, you'd want not to prune those but exclude any file below them but the xyz.js ones.

So:

find . \( \
          -path ./node_modules -o \
          -path './.git*' -o \
          -path ./build \
       \) -prune -o \( \
          ! -path '*/enhancers' ! -path '*/enhancers/*' -o \
          -name xyz.js \
       \) -print

Here on several lines for legibility.

Replace -print with -exec sh -c 'for file do something with "$file"; done' sh {} + if you want to do something with those files.

Or if you want to post-process the output, use -print0 and use the -z/--null/-0 options of grep/xargs/cut/sort (assuming GNU implementations or compatible) for them to work on NUL-delimited input.

Answer 2

You can make a bash shellscript with two rsync command lines with filter rules,

#!/bin/bash

rsync -Havn \
 --filter="- target" \
 --filter="- node_modules" \
 --filter="- .git" \
 --filter="- build" \
 --filter="- enhancers" \
 ./ target

rsync -Havn  \
 --filter="+ xyz.js" \
 --filter="+ */" \
 --filter="- *" \
 src target

It is fairly easy to edit this shellscript until it produces a nice output with -n which means 'dry run' only showing what is the intention.

When things look correct, you can remove -n from the two command lines and let rsync do its thing. Or maybe you are happy with the text output, and will save it to a file or pipe it somehow into other commands (to do other things than rsync-copying).