Question

I have a directory ./src with files. I would like to extract all .c files in it, except those .c files that are in ./src/test. I have tried variants of

find ./src -name "*.c" -and -not -name ./src/test

(inspired from here) but none have succeeded.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I’d use a grep -v post-filter, assuming you don’t have newlines in your paths (spaces will be OK):

find ./src -name "*.c" | grep -v '/src/test/'

I think your trouble is that the -name looks at the last element of the path only, so a -name with slashes in it simply doesn’t work.

If your version of find supports it, using -path in place of -name might work:

find ./src -name "*.c" -and -not -path './src/test/*'

Note the modified operand to -path.