find path excluding doesn't work when permission denied

Question

There is some strange behavior while excluding path from find:

find ~ -not -path "~/sandboxes/*" -name 'some-file.vmdk'

gives:

/home/user/VMs/win/some-file.vmdk
find: ‘/home/user/sandboxes/debian7.amd64.buildd/root/...’: Permission denied
find: ‘/home/user/sandboxes/debian7.amd64.buildd/var/...’: Permission denied

What's wrong?

P.S. unfortunately -prune doesn't work too:

find ~ -path "/home/user/sandboxes/*" -prune -o -name 'some-file.vmdk'

gives more weird results:

/home/user/nemu_vm/win/some-file.vmdk
/home/user/sandboxes/debian7.amd64.buildd
/home/user/sandboxes/debian9.amd64.buildd

Useful link

Answer 1

Your command

find ~ -path "/home/user/sandboxes/*" -prune -o -name 'some-file.vmdk'

prints

/home/user/sandboxes/debian7.amd64.buildd
/home/user/sandboxes/debian9.amd64.buildd

because the default action when no action is supplied is to output the found pathnames. The above pathnames are found, and then those paths are pruned. Pruning a search path does not exclude these pathnames from being printed.

However, if you add -print to the very end, as in

find "$HOME" -path "$HOME/sandboxes" -prune -o -name 'some-file.vmdk' -print

then those pathnames would not be printed. This is because now you have an explicit action (the -print), so no default actions are triggered. The -print only applies to the right hand side of -o.

Note that the * is not needed, and that the variable $HOME is easier to work with than ~, especially in scripts.

---

Your first command,

find ~ -not -path "~/sandboxes/*" -name 'some-file.vmdk'

very likely does not work as ~ is not expanded within quotes.

Assuming you used $HOME instead, it also does not prune the search path, which means it would still enter ~/sandboxes, but it would never print any pathnames from beneath that path. Since it enters the directory, it would still give you the permission errors when it reaches the inaccessibly directories.

Answer 2

You can try this way :

find ~ \! -path "*/sandboxes/*" -name 'some-file.vmdk'

Or with -prune :

find ~ -path "*/sandboxes" -prune -o -name 'some-file.vmdk'

but can't find a way to remove the print of ~/sandboxes