Consider the following folder structure starting in some root folder
/root/
/root/.git
/root/node_modules
/root/A/
/root/A/stuff1/
/root/A/stuff2/
/root/A/node_modules/
/root/B/
/root/A/stuff1/
/root/A/stuff2/
/root/B/node_modules/
...
Now I am in /root and I'd like to find all my own files inside it.
I have a small number of my own files and the huge number of files inside node_modules and .git.
Because of that, traversing node_modules and filtering it out is unacceptable, as it takes too much time. I want the command to never enter the node_modules or .git folder.
For excluding files only directly from the folder of the search:
find . -not \( -path './.git' -prune \) -not \( -path './node_modules' -prune \) -type f
If you want to exclude certain paths that are in subfolders, you can do that too using * wildcard.
Say you have node_modules too inside stuff1 and stuff2, and additionally dist and lib folders:
find . -not \( -path './.git' -prune \) -not \( -path './node_modules' -prune \) -not \( -path './*/node_modules' -prune \) -not \( -path './*/dist' -prune \) -not \( -path './*/lib' -prune \) -type f
Tested on Windows using git bash 1.9.5
It seems however it does not work properly on Windows when a filter like -name '*.js' is passed. The workaround could be to not use -name and pipe to grep instead.
Kudos to @Daniel C. Sobral
