UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm trying to prune out the findings of a certain directory path and have something like the following workiing on Linux (Linux 2.6.9-67.0.7.ELsmp #1 SMP x86_64):
find . -path 'test/tmp' -prune -o -print

I now need to have this working on sun/solaris (SunOS 5.8 Generic_117350-34 sun4u sparc SUNW,Netra-T12) and noticed that the find command there doesn't support the "-path" argument:
$ find . -path 'test/tmp' -prune -o -print
find: bad option -path
find: path-list predicate-list
$

I tried using '-name' instead of '-path', however, when I use
find . -name 'test/tmp' -prune -o -print
all the files and dirs under the test/tmp hierarchy is found as if there was no matching expression to be pruned out.

I also tried to use just 'tmp' within '-name' as in
find . -name 'tmp' -prune -o -print
and even though this suppressed the finding of the test/tmp hierarchy, it also excluded other "tmp" directories under different paths that I don't want "find" to exclude (ie. /var/tmp, /etc/tmp, /tmp, ...)

I read that some versions of the "find" command also supports a "-wholename" variant, but I'm afraid the /usr/bin/find command on the Sun/Solaris machine I'm using doesn't seem to have it available.

Any ideas on how I can use find on sun/solaris to recursively find all the files and directories but skipping a single specific directory tree?

Thanks in advance!

Not the best solution, but one alternative would be filtering out the lines that you don't need using an external command, something like ...

Code:

find . -print | egrep -v '/dir1/temp/*'

AFAIK -wholename option is GNU specific.

What about if I was wanting to delete files using this mehod?

Code:

find . -name "*" -type f -exec rm {} \; | egrep -v './abc/*'

Something like that, except that deletes everything because the egrep is ran after the find command.

Exactly, when egrep comes it's too late, rm has already done its job ..., try something like this instead:

Code:

find . -type f | egrep -v '\./abc/.*' | xargs rm

Proceed carefully, this will remove files.

if you wanna exclude file then use following..

Code:

find . ! -name "\./abc/.*" -type f -exec rm {} \;

This takes place in Solaris, and the find's default RE ( globbing ) is limited, that's why you need a finer filter.

i don't think

Code:

find . -type f | egrep -v '\./abc/.*' | xargs rm

this command and

Code:

find . ! -name "\./abc/.*" -type f -exec rm {} \;

will produce different output