Bash - Find files excluding file patterns and subfolder patterns

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello.
For a given folder, I want to select any files

find $PATH1 -f \( -name "*"

but omit any files like pattern name

 ! -iname "*.jpg" ! -iname "*.xsession*" ..... \)

and also omit any subfolder like pattern name

 -type d \( -name "/etc/gconf/gconf.*" -o -name "*cache*" -o -name "*Cache*" -o -name ".mozilla" -o -name ".googleearth"  \) -prune

My last try is :

find "$PATH1"  -type f \( -name "*" ! -iname "*~"  ! -iname "*.iso"  ! -iname "*.tar"  ! -iname "*.bz2"  ! -iname "*.gz"
  ! -iname "*.tgz"  ! -iname "*.7z"  ! -iname "*.sfx"  ! -iname "*.zip"  ! -iname "*.rpm" 
 ! -iname "*.gz.aa"  ! -iname "*.rpm"  ! -iname "*.pdf"  ! -iname "*.png"  ! -iname "*.jpg"  ! -iname "*.dll" 
 ! -iname "*.exe"  ! -iname "*.xsession*"  \) -type d \( -name "/etc/gconf/gconf.*" -o -name ".cache" 
-o -name ".Cache" -o -name ".mozilla" -o -name ".googleearth"  \) -prune  -o -print

I still got files ".cache*" from ".mozilla", ".Cache*" from googleearth, ".xsession-errors" and ".xsession-errors-:0"

By the way I am not sure that the pattern

! -iname "*.xsession*"

is a good pattern for

/home/some_user/.xsession-errors

Filtering subfolders works :

find "$PATH1"  -type d \( -name "/etc/gconf/gconf.*" -o -name ".cache" 
-o -name ".Cache" -o -name ".mozilla" -o -name ".googleearth"  \) -prune  -o -print

How to add file patterns exclusion.

Any help is welcome

2

Maintaining something like that is hard - as you found out.
Consider splitting up the lists, make a file with the exclusion patterns, one pattern per line.
Call it exclusions. Changes in red.

Example:

find "$PATH1"  -type f \( -name "*" ! -iname "*~"  ! -iname "*.iso"  ! -iname "*.tar"  ! -iname "*.bz2"  ! -iname "*.gz"
  ! -iname "*.tgz"  ! -iname "*.7z"  ! -iname "*.sfx"  ! -iname "*.zip"  ! -iname "*.rpm" 
 ! -iname "*.gz.aa"  ! -iname "*.rpm"  ! -iname "*.pdf"  ! -iname "*.png"  ! -iname "*.jpg"  ! -iname "*.dll" 
 ! -iname "*.exe"  ! -iname "*.xsession*"  \) -a -type d \( -name "/etc/gconf/gconf.*" -o -name ".cache" 
-o -name ".Cache" -o -name ".mozilla" -o -name ".googleearth"  \) -prune  -o -print    | grep -v -f $HOME/exclusions > resultfile

In order to test exclusions you can feed it output from a directory that had oddball file names

ls -a /path/to/somedir | grep  -f $HOME/exclusions   # note: no -v option
3

By default

echo *

does not match filenames that start with a dot.
So you might need ! -iname "*.xession* ! -iname ".xsession*"
But not needed if you exclude all .* by requiring -name * .
To not descend into directories, I think you need -o instead of the -a in the last post. But how to fiddle the -print in the middle?
It is more comfortable to first exclude the directories.

find "$PATH1" \
 -type d \( -path "/etc/gconf/gconf.*" -o -name ".[Cc]ache" -o -name ".mozilla" -o -name ".googleearth"  \) -prune -o \
 -type f  -name "*"  ! -iname "*~"  ! -iname "*.iso"  ! -iname "*.tar"  ! -iname "*.bz2"  ! -iname "*.gz"   ! -iname "*.tgz" \
 ! -iname "*.7z"  ! -iname "*.sfx"  ! -iname "*.zip"  ! -iname "*.rpm"  ! -iname "*.gz.aa"  ! -iname "*.pdf"  ! -iname "*.png" \
 ! -iname "*.jpg"  ! -iname "*.dll"  ! -iname "*.exe"  ! -iname "*.xsession*" -print

The explicit -print is needed, otherwise it will default-print the pruned directory names.