Shell Programming and Scripting

All,
I'm reading around and getting confused on how to exclude directories on a find command.

So, what I want is a find command that can find a file with a name and exclude certain directories.

ie

find / -name filename.txt and ignore directory/subdir called mounts and ctshare

Code:

find / -name test.txt \( -name ctshare -o -name mounts \) -prune -o print

It isn't working as expected. Any help?

Code:

dirs=$(find / -type d \( -name ctshare -o -name mounts \) | tr '\n' ' ')  )
find $dirs -name test.txt

build a list of directories, feed that to a second find command.

Similar to the above, but to exclude the directories:

Code:

find / -type d \( ! -name ctshare -a ! -name mounts \) -print | while read DIR
do
        find "${DIR}" -type f -name 'test.txt' -print
done

The terms in your find command are slightly out of order, so the logic is incorrect. The terms '-name test.txt' and '( -name ctshare -o -name mounts )' are mutually-exclusive; one of them will always be false. This means that -prune will never be reached (since boolean AND expressions in find short-circuit, just as they do in sh and C), the left-hand side of the -o is always false and for every pathname evaluated by your find command, -print will be executed (assuming the missing - was a typo and not actually missing from your command).

I think the following is what you are going for:

Code:

find / \( -name ctshare -o -name mounts \) -prune -o -name test.txt -print

Regards,
Alister