This article focuses on that model and shows practical, working examples for excluding directories while still searching or filtering the files you care about.

NOTE: find evaluates expressions left-to-right using implicit logical ANDs ( -a ). The -prune action only affects directory traversal and must be combined with logical OR ( -o ) to allow other results to be processed.

Why Prune?

Think of the old lady across the street who you’ll see in the Spring time, out there pruning her flowers. What’s she doing in that pruning!? Crazy old bat! Naw, she’s just taking off what she doesn’t want there! She’s making her results more beautiful by cutting away the parts that aren’t needed. That’s pruning!

In the case of the find command, it’s the same thing. You have to tell it what you want to prune from the results. It’s not super easy to figure out how to do it. You might think, “prune xyz from my path”, but that’s actually not it. It’s more like, “take this [path] and -prune it”. In other words, think like the old lady: decide and identify what you want to have pruned, then say: “okay, it’s [this path] that i don’t like! Now prune it!” That is, talk about paths first, then talk about what you want to have done with it.

Try the following in your web dev primary folder. It doesn’t need to be the same path as mine. You’ll figure it out. For now, let’s imagine your web dev containers are on the path /var/www/html . That being agreed upon and understood, let’s go for it!

Pruning Test – Find that Kind Bud, yo!

The -prune option does not “filter results” by itself. Instead, it tells find not to descend into a matched directory .

This matters because find evaluates expressions left-to-right, combining them with implicit logical ANDs unless otherwise specified.

In practice, this means -prune almost always appears with a logical OR ( -o ), so that:

  • directories you want to exclude are pruned, and
  • everything else is still evaluated and printed or processed.

find . \
-path "./node_modules" -prune -o \  \#If the path matches ./node_modules, prune it (do not descend)
-type f -print

Find by Filename

\# find a file named "notes.css". but first PRUNE WordPress (exclude, like the old lady with the flowers) native directories which are -type directory. 
\# -o (OR) printf (print Formatted results, including %Time), then | (pipe) those results to the sort command. 
find . -name 'wp-*' -type d -prune -o -type f -iname notes.css -printf "%T@ %Tc %p\n" | sort -n

Note: the -o (OR) is required here (in a -prune operation); without it, -prune would stop traversal but prevent later matches from being evaluated. Think of it as, “you found that? cool. will you stop there ‘OR’ keep going?”

The find operation above is pretty simple. We’re telling find to prune folders named “wp-*”, where the asterisk is a simple wildcard so all folders named wp-something are pruned. Then -printf (print formatted) is used to get the timestamp info we need if we want to sort by date modified (which is what I wanted there). finally those results are piped (using the | pipe character) to the sort command. Try it!

The following operation is a bit more complex in that it’s using multiple prune expressions. Then grep (well, egrep because I prefer the extended regular expressions option, though it’s not utilized here) to dig into the results and see if there’s anything matching my grep test, which is simple: find .html or .js in the contents of the text files found. Try this one if you’re developing with Node.js! Play around with changing what you want to find in the grep expression. Try changing some of the prune paths. See what you come up with. 

\#LOOK IN FOLDERS at PATH .
\# PRUNE:
\# node_modules and is -type d(irectory)
\# public
\# assets
\# GREP files containing \.html|\.js

find . ( -path "./node_modules*" -type d -prune -o -path "./public" -prune -o -path "./assets" -prune ) -o -type f -exec egrep -nH --color ".html|.js" {} +

grep operates on text streams, not directory trees. In this workflow, find is responsible for filesystem traversal and exclusion (-prune), while grep filters either: 

filenames passed via standard output, or
file contents when used via -exec or xargs.

Let’s modify the find expression above once more, to exclude more stuff and enhance our results using grep –color! We’ll start by pruning more stuff. PATH probably contains something about a log. PRUNE IT! prune a bunch of stuff... including prune vendor to exclude Composer installations prune wso.net under which I have backup sites from that host prune node_modues to exclude npm installations prune wp- to exclude wordpress stuff prune *.sql" to exclude database backup files 

find . -path "./*log" -prune 
-o 
-path "./*vendor/*" -prune 
-o 
-path "./*wso.net*" -prune 
-o 
-path "./*node_modules*" -prune 
-o 
-path "./*wp-*" -prune 
-o 
-path "*.sql" -type f -prune 

##  FINISHED PRUNING
## now lets -exec (execute) grep using the --color option to highlight our found results!


-o -type f -exec egrep -nH --color ".html|.js" {} +


# DONE:

One Line

What follows are the above commands, as a single line (without new line breaks which could break for executing the separate lines)

Try it as follows, in one usable line to copy paste into your BASH shell:

find . -path "./*log" -prune -o -path "./*vendor/*" -prune -o -path "./*wso.net*" -prune -o -path "./*node_modules*" -prune -o -path "./*wp-*" -prune -o -path "*.sql" -type f -prune -o -type f -exec egrep -nH --color "\.html|\.js" {} +

Now it’s time for you to go off and try some things on your own. Work with it until you feel like you have a solid foundation for how to use prune, and -exec in the find expression, along with how to | pipe the results to another command, like sort is used above. You got this! Please do come back and provide a comment here if you found it useful, or likewise if you find it useless! Small List of Examples to Try

Some of the examples produce the same results. Can you tell why?

What is the purpose of $(realpath *) ? 

\# SORT BY MOST RECENTLY MODIFIED
find . -name 'wp-*' -type d -prune -o -type f -iname notes.css -printf "%T@ %Tc %p\n" | sort -n

# FIND BUT -prune (excludee) paths beneath 'node_modules' (packages installed by NPM)
find . -name 'node_modules' -type d -prune -o -type f -exec grep ".html" {} +


#FIND ONLY .html in folder at path .
#    prune (exclude) node_modules and adminer.php
find . -name 'node_modules' -type d -prune -o -type f -name 'adminer.php' -prune -o -type f -exec grep -nH --color ".html" {} +


# FIND IN FOLDERS at PATH .
#            PRUNE:
\#                node_modules
#                public_
#                assets
#            GREP files containing .html|.js


find . ( -path "./node_modules" -prune -o -path "./public" -prune -o -path "./assets" -prune )           -o -type f -exec egrep -nH --color ".html|.js" $(realpath *) {} +


# FIND - Using -exec
# Use grep to show instances of 'html' in -type f (files)
# tell grep to display the line number (-n),
# display 2 lines of --context around the located 'html'
find . -type f -exec grep -n --context=2 --color html $(realpath *) {} +


# xARGS + FIND
# Use xARGS to pass FIND results to external app, as arguments
#
# EXAMPLE:
# CD to nginx sites-available direcotry#
# Find all items of -type file
#
# pass the aguments (the -type file found) to grep
# display the line containing 'server'
# Use realpath to output the FULL PATH to the item discovered
cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
find . -type f | xargs grep -n --color server $(realpath *)