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Linux find large files exclude directory o files and some pdf files. The find command support standard UNIX regex to match, include or exclude files. txt AcctInq. To get the largest items (files and folders), sorted, with human readable sizes on Linux: du -h | sort tar also has an "exclude" option you can add one or more times. gz main_dir/ Share find /path/on/server -mtime -1 -name '*. dirs. So i'd like to be able to say if the file that was modified yesterday is in a folder named statistics find is a very versatile command that can be used to list files recursively inside a folder based on several useful criteria. With ^, instead of adding (N. txt I wrote a rsync script which uses find command to find all files which are older than 10 minutes and copies them to a remote server. But, I almost always have super large network shares mounted and these are included in the --exclude=PATTERN exclude files that match PATTERN so for example. ' Similar to your approach but perhaps a bit simpler. f90 . Later using find command filter the result from it. Here are some numerous frequently asked questions about excluding files and directories in the “find” command in Linux: Q: Can I exclude hidden directories from a Under each folder I have a file called hi. *\. For example, one of the common operations is searching files. It contains many multimedia files (jpg, jpeg, mp4, mpeg). git or node_modules from the search tree, you would use-type d \( -name . ' ! -name '. For example: tar czvf documents. This option should I see you can use du command with another option. Update You can give it try to fslint also. Viewed 918 times How to exclude directories in find OUTPUT. It is absolutely worth trying. First, let’s see what a normal output of the find command looks like. err files with certain content in certain directory and need to move the *. Although the question has an answer elsewhere, it may be worth knowing why your command didn't work right: You omitted an operator between -path "build" -prune and -path "bin" -prune, and -and is assumed where the operator is omitted, thus the -path "bin" is not evaluated when -path "build" returns false. find -type f | wc You can do this with two command sequences. As you may already know, Rsync is a fast and versatile tool to copy files and folders locally, or to/from another host over any remote shell, or to/from a remote rsync daemon. /fslint /path/to/directory Stack Exchange Network. In You can also exclude numerous directories. 4. >> Options:-mindepth 1 : To exclude root directory-maxdepth 1 : To avoid parsing sub directories. * -name . Specifically, we can use the ls command with the -lS option to make the command list the files by their size in descending order. In this way, you are not actually outputting the filenames, but you are outputting a single blank line per file encountered, regardless of the name, so the line count will work in any case. for eg. fd supports all OS requested by the OP and run much faster than find. <directory>: The directory on which to execute the file count. Meet the Linux Find Command. 7z" -and -not find . Use the -prune primary. gitgnore and . I'd like to go through the whole home directory and find out the top 10 space-consuming directories or files, to decide whom to be removed. 2. To find the size of a specific file or directory, use the following command: du -sh /path/to/file_or_directory I knew how to delete files and exclude some, like this: rm `find ~/temporary/Test\ 1 -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1|grep -v 'A'` but the problem is the folder 'Test 1' containing a Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted ├── sub\ 1 │ ├── one │ ├── three @Grove, I still don't see what the problem is, you want to exclude files that end with . To look in all folders, I would do: find * -name hi. While this is a way to exclude NFS mounts, it also includes any other non-starting filesystem. For example, to skip the directory `src/emacs' and all files and directories under it, and print the names of the other files found, do something like this: find . /misc -prune -o -exec tree -P <pattern> {} \; or you can use -name "*. Usually, Linux systems run out of disk space due to large log or backup files. txt' (* represents some wild card search) To exclude files use --exclude and to exclude directories use --exclude-dir. Handles files with spaces in the names, and produces human readable file sizes in the output. h rootdir The syntax for --exclude is identical. grep pattern -r --include=\*. I want to exclude files with some particular extensions, like exclude mp4, jpeg Bit of a dirty script, but this will find all directories that don't contain a . vimrc I want to exclude all directories from the find command target. bed, but exclude files in the tmp and scripts folders. Over time, your disk drive may get cluttered with a lot of unnecessary files taking up large amounts of disk space. tgz --files-from=include. I had tried multiple syntaxes but did not succeed - find / -user dummyadm -print \( -fstype nfs -o type l \) -prune Please help! Find the Largest Files with find command in Linux. temp/ Third, remove "Default. Read the rest of the article to get a detailed explanation of these commands. txt” find all files with a specific extension: find / -type f -name “*. js" ! -name "*-min*" ! -name "*console*" \) | grep -v "/path/to/test_folder/" | while read How to search for directories? The following command not only find you the top 50 largest files (>100M) on your filesystem, but also sort (GNU sort) by the biggest: -xdev Don't descend In this tutorial, we discussed three practical examples to exclude directories from the find command’s search path. cpp') Learn how to free up disk space in Linux with the du (disk usage) command with our 13 best examples, which will help you find large files and directories easily. Matching What if you want to ignore all sub directories and files, but not a directory itself? For example showing the build directory or the . @Grove, I still don't see what the problem is, you want to exclude files that end with . Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. i'm trying to use this ssh command in centos 5 to zip up a directory full up folders and files yet exclude the examples below. \*. The inode size is the same you get when you run stat: $ du -s dir 61943836851 dir $ stat -c %s dir 53248 So it's not possible with find alone. For example, Absolutely. To ignore a whole directory tree, use -prune rather than checking every file in the tree. Tour Start here for a quick overview of the site Help Center Detailed answers to any questions you might have Meta Discuss the workings and policies of this site Introduction. /misc -prune -oto your find command. Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram. However, we can make it efficient by excluding certain directories from the search path. /src/emacs -prune -o -print For me, I found the find command as a standalone tool somehow cumbersome. Use --exclude and --exclude-dir to refine your search: This solution will go through all files (not exactly excluding from the find command), but will produce an output skipping files from a list of exclusions. py` file from the python package such as django. -type d -print0 | xargs -0 du | sort -n | tail -10 | cut -f2 | xargs -I{} du -sh {} Only difference is -type {d:f}. Closest to what you asked, if you are using GNU find then you can use a negated -regex test to filter out the files you don't want to see. – dimo414. If using "find" is not mandatory requirement, assuming "main_dir" as the parent directory name. find files by name in Linux: find / -name “*. For instance: find . To find large files in a directory, you can combine ls -al with sort and head: ls -al /home/user/Documents | sort -k 5 -n -r | head -n 5. You can specify many starting points in a single invocation of find and build an expression (e. This can be especially useful when dealing with large file systems or directories with many subdirectories. This guide has provided all feasible methods to find out large files in the root filesystem in I have a folder with lots of files and folder. As explained in the manual: The options attribute controls the treatment of the symbolic links, debugging options, and optimization method. Find the files and directories with ganglia on it, except for the directories with name Downloads. For example, you can exclude certain directories or files from the analysis, export the results to a file, or even run ncdu in a read-only mode. You can call it like fdupes -r /path/to/dup/directory and it will print out a list of dupes. dat? I do not want to type: find A/* B/* C/* -name because I obviously have more than three folders and those were just used as an Examples of find command in Linux. One reason why results are nothing is (from the manual) If the whole expression contains no actions other than -prune or -print, -print is performed on all files for which the whole expression is true. php database. While the methods mentioned focus on directories, you can find large files using the find I want to find files that end with _peaks. zip' ! -name '. If you want to exclude a directory, you can use the --exclude flag. Find Large Files Using the find -x skip directories on different file systems-d from depth, print the total for a directory (or file, with --all) only if it is N or fewer levels below the command line argument-t from threshold, exclude entries smaller than SIZE if positive, or entries greater than SIZE if negative With standard available tools: To list the top 10 largest files from the current directory: du . To find Find all *. txt ) After that, loop through all files in the directory you want to exclude, checking if the filename is in the array you don't want to exclude; if its not then delete the I have a folder with lots of files and folder. log and . Find a directory using its name . In order to find all file above a specific file size (eg. This tutorial explains how to find the largest files and directories in Linux systems using the find and du commands. -type d -exec sh -c '[ "$(find "$1" -path "$1/*" -prune -type f -size +1M -exec sh -c "for file; do echo . You can write complex queries By using the -prune option or combining the find command with the ! (negation) operator, you can efficiently exclude specific directories, streamlining your search process. First, we are going to look at how we can find the largest directories and files in Linux combined, execute the following command to find the top 10 largest directories and files on your Linux server: # du -ah /* 2>/dev/null | sort -rh | head Irrelevant. How could I exclude specified folders in 'grep' While Linux offers several options for moving directories and files, many users prefer rsync because of its efficiency, flexibility, and versatility. No, basically my goal is for find to ignore all of the directories leading up to the wanted file, but still delete other files and directories in the tree. cpp -name \*. ) (0) is a parameter expansion flag that splits on NUL characters (as we use locate -0), short for (ps:\0:). (N. -type f \( -name "*. du --max-depth=1 /path | sort -r -k1,1n If one of them really sticks out (the last one on the list is the largest due to sort -r), then you re-run the command on that directory, and keep going until you find the offending directory / file. find -type f | wc du -h lists all the files with sizes, in human readable format; sort -rh reverses the sort, in human readable format; head -5 returns the top 5 results, (you could also not reverse it but still have to sort it) and use tail -n 5; Instead of / you could use any given directory to list only files below that point in your file system. You can easily find the largest files in Linux using this command. Exclude dir_to_exclude directory: find /path/to/search -path "dir_to_exclude" -prune -o -print Finding and Moving Large Media Files. find A/ B/ -prune -o file1. Otherwise, if you had any files in the current working directory that matched the pattern, If your files have newlines in them, you can still use find to do it by using an -exec instead of a print: find . This works great, however, what I want to also do is exclude any actual directories from the output, so if there is a directory structure as follows: test -- foo. A straightforward way is to run three separate find commands in sequence. 8 seconds on my computer, for tree to count my whole home directory, which was 24,777 directories, 238,680 files. The most basic method for excluding files and directories with Rsync is by using the --exclude option followed by the name of the file or directory you want to exclude. Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge Linux find - exclude parent Under each folder I have a file called hi. How to find the biggest folders in Linux? The du command is used for getting the disk usage. ” indicates to search the current directory. Getting rid of head -10 and just looking at all the names it gives me, it seems like it's only returning directories and files named Kconfig and Makefile, but I Usually . Method 1- using rsync command. This simple task becomes time-consuming if the system has a large number of files. For example, here’s how we can find the largest file in the /usr/bin directory on our Getting size of directories and exclude some folders; Using --exclude with the du command; In (1) regular expressions are applied which won't work in my case - at least not comfortably. Following command shows you one level of directories and their sizes. (2) This will still descend into the "excluded" directory and chown files in it. To do this, I’ll I wrote a rsync script which uses find command to find all files which are older than 10 minutes and copies them to a remote server. The backup filenames could terminate in . out' as @StevenPenny and @RalfFriedlal The -r option ensures grep traverses the directory tree, while -R also follows symbolic links. We can use these commands in day-to-day life while working When I used the find command, I almost always need to search the local drives. cpp -exec grep -nw 'textPattern' {} \; You can use different options of find to improve your file search. tar. *(/) would match any directory starting with . I want to exclude files with some particular extensions, like exclude mp4, jpeg use -F if the first file has strings, not patterns; use -w to prevent partial matches while not using the -x option; This post has a great discussion on this topic (grep -f on large files): Fastest way to find lines of a file from another larger file in Bash; And this post talks about grep -vf: grep -vf too slow with large files In this article, we will learn how can you exclude a directory from the search result of the file command. 135. -printf 1 | wc -c this doesn't specifically answer the OP question so maybe why it was downvoted, but it is way useful for saving the directory structure of a particular directory without the contents which is important for saving then restoring a filesystem folder where you don't want to save the logs for example but do need to save the folder structure so that when you restore you don't Thanks for contributing an answer to Stack Overflow! Please be sure to answer the question. If you tell me you cannot do it after reading the linked answer then I will probably write an answer However, if the list of files or directories you want to exclude is large, it's more efficient to put all the exclude patterns in a file and use the --exclude-from option to reference that file. file, such as . ) too, which may be undesired. I use a find command to search for all files with a given extension within the current subdirectories ignoring certain directory path:. Also, this could be adjusted to handle newlines in file names too. \tower. rsync -av --exclude='*. Good answer. -type f will cause find to not detect symbolic file links. I can pipe the find output through grep to Linux: using find to locate files older than <date> 9. Usually "to exclude a directory" means "to exclude a directory along with its content". For example, instead of using multiple --exclude options like this: rsync -a --exclude='file1. | sort -nr | head -n10 To list the largest directories from the current directory: du -s * | sort -nr | head -n10 UPDATE These days I usually use a more readable form (as Jay Chakra explains in another answer and leave off the | head -n10, simply let it scroll off the screen. command Unlike the --exclude parameter for rsync that can excludes both files and directories, the *nix find command's -prune parameter can only exclude directories. I want to do two things : Find the total counts of all files. -path . to match only regular files, N to remove the element if it doesn't match (doesn't exist or is not a regular file, or we Since you have -h switch, directories greater will have size and then letter G. Read: How to find the size of a file or directory on Linux using du and ncdu commands I want to use regex's with Linux's find command to dive recursively into a gargantuan directory tree, showing me all of the . F90 . Here’s a brief explanation of the options and parameters for the find command. First define an array with the name of the files you do not want to exclude: files=( backup. Whether you’re trying to identify space-hogging directories, manage disk space efficiently, or simply gain insights into storage consumption, the du command provides valuable information. -type f -iname ". Largest file listed last. A Normal File Search Using the find Command. txt” -xdev xdev : don’t cross filesystem boundaries; type f : only files; find files of a certain size: find / ! -type d -size +1000k ! -type d : exclude directories It ensures that if there is one file to search, grep will think there are two and use the multiple-file output mode. So the final answer is: grep pattern /dev/null $(find . -name "*. find only files in directory with permissions not set to 644 on linux. /test/main. 7z" -type f -mtime +180 -delete If you'd like to exclude any occerance of _, you can use the and and not operators of find, like: find . png Finally, copy all files from "temp" folder to your destination folder: cp -R temp/. ; done" innersh The find command is another Linux utility that can be used to find files and directory. We are working inside our test directory and the “. Ultimately I want to send the output to an xargs command to do certain processing on all of the matching files. Using the different filters available with the find command will help you find large files that you want. dat. tgz --exlude dir1 --exclude dir2 * Note: I would rather create the tar in a different directory, to avoid including documents. Discover how to efficiently find the largest directories in Linux, optimizing storage management and system performance with simple command-line tools. svn" directories. *(^/) matches any "non-directory" like files and symbolic links (including those pointing to directories). For more information on Glob Qualifiers have a look at man 1 zshexpn. txt CardInq. head -n 10 limits the output to the top 10 lines. This command lists the contents of /home/user/Documents, sorts the output by the fifth column (file size) in reverse numerical order, and displays the top 5 results. Find largest files Linux. But I still add another [I hope] interresting option, as you are on linux: mc (aka: Midnight Commander) Start it, and then : on the Right panel, navigate to where you want your files to end up, and on the Left panel, navigate "inside" the ZIP file, and at that first level select + copy the things you need (ie, select all, and unselect the EXCLUDE This file is called an exclude file. something (whatever this might be), use find and locate those files. ) qualifies the * glob to match only plain files. For example, the following command will check the size of the /etc directory: $ find /etc -maxdepth 0 -type d -exec du -sh {} \; You can also exclude files with a specific extension, name, or word somewhere in the path. text . For example, if you want to exclude all files with the “. find . If there’s a subdirectory you wish to exclude from the transfer, rsync gives us two options for doing so. 2. d' You may need to use the * wildcard if you want to match a directory name without specifying its position in the filesystem tree. hidden) but also have to exclude folders that start with an @ (like @eaDir). py" However, it also list '. As far as I am aware there is no real alternative to using tools that scan the complete file system to find current disk hogs. xml files to its parent directory and remove *. txt AcctMod. 1. git file in them: #!/bin/bash # find dirs that contain *. err files 1 bash count files and directory, summary size and EXCLUDE folders that are fuse|sshfs You have several options. However, in certain scenarios, you may want to exclude specific files or directories from the du output. h . cpp, and . Also note that ,, TAB, newline or " are as valid as any other character in filenames on Unix-like systems. You will see the larger files at the top of the list descending to the If you just want to limit the find to the first level you can do: find /dev -maxdepth 1 -name 'abc-*' or if you particularly want to exclude the . The du command can quickly provide this information, allowing you to assess storage requirements and make informed decisions. tgz itself in tar in case you run the command another time without deleting it in the meantime. / or . log” extension, you can use the following command:. js" ! -name "*-min-*" ! -name "*console*" Please note two things-path must come as the first argument; the pattern matches the whole filename, so -path test will not match anything, ever; By the way, I'm not sure why you are using parentheses, it doesn't So, if your intention is to exclude files starting with _, your full command line would be: find /backups/ -name "[^_]*. If you find yourself in a situation where you have to exclude a multitude of diverse files and directories, the rsync –exclude-from flag can come to your rescue. Top Three Largest Files: Identify the three largest documents in your directory, ranked by size. find . The output By default, find detect symbolic file links (but not the ones in symbolic directory links). Ignore Third-Party Directories As you can see, carefully excluding directories really fine-tunes Linux find searches. In my case I needed to remove all files and folder except for zip files, inspired on accepted answer (I gave of course a +1), while from folder I want to clean all except zip files I use find . Essentially my question is: Can I feed --exclude a list of files/directories and if yes, how? The rsync command on a Linux system can be used to synchronize the contents of two directories. Here, if on a GNU system, you could do: The ` du` command in Linux is a powerful utility that allows users to analyze and report on disk usage within directories and files. The "ls -p | grep" answers do not elegantly deal with other elements of ls such as -R should they be desired Use find to search for any file larger than 100MB in the current directory. Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build For example, to locate extremely large files over 100MiB in size use the command below: (this is not 100MB, see here): find / -size +100M -ls. If you'd like to prune any directory called either . Then we can add a list of file or directory names to be excluded, each separated by a newline: file1. The “find” command in Linux helps locate the files and directories to avoid having to find them manually. sudo find / -iname “*ganglia*” | egrep -vi “downloads” Or you can exclude specific directory like, find files or directories with ganglia except in the directory /home/simpleboy/Downloads Inside the /tmp I want to find files older than 180 day, but I also want to exclude some folders from the search like . I created a tar. There could be many ways to do this task. cpp" in find Use the shell globbing syntax:. There are some directories that can cause problem with find, and especially find /. ext" This is working pretty well but now I want to ignore another path except one precise subdirectory in it. git -o -name node_modules \) -prune This would cause find to not even enter these directories (the -type d is not strictly necessary, but I'll use it here for symmetry with -type f; see below). The following example excludes the dir1 and dir3 to leave the dir2 only. I honestly searched a lot, but didn't find exactly what I You can do this with two command sequences. cpp --include=\*. and my goal is to find every cpp file besides file1. What I have so far is a hack of the following solutions from StackOverflow: How to set chmod for a folder and all of its subfolders and files in Linux Ubuntu Terminal? Exclude directory from find . 0. Then, to get the largest file, we take the first row of the output. Method 1 is better since it will not descend into the specified directories , for method 2 find still search those directories but just not print it out ,which means method 1 makes sense more, especially while searching huge number of files. /test/foo. du -h -d 1 -t 5G-h, --human-readable print sizes in human readable format (e. The argument to tail is the number of results you see (here the 10 By default these searches ignore hidden files and directories, files identified in . ! -path "*/test/*" -type f -name "*. @Mattia72: No, it is fundamentally impossible to fully emulate -readable with -perm - see my previous comment and consider this example: echo 'hi' > file; sudo chown nobody:nobody file; sudo chmod o-r file; find file -perm -u=r prints file, because its user read bit is set, but it relates to the the nobody user, not the current user. and . fdignore files but those can be also included by specifying the appropriate fd options (--hidden and --no-ignore respectively). -path '*/wizard/* -type f Since you have -h switch, directories greater will have size and then letter G. it's not working. With it, you can search by filename, size, permissions, ownership, dates, and other metadata. Acct/ ---> directory needs to be excluded from grep AcctReq/ ---> directory needs to be excluded from grep AcctAdd. I am aware of following two methods. By understanding and utilizing options like -prune , To exclude multiple directories, just pass the --exclude flag again. file-name -print -o -prune If you need to -exec something, such as to delete the Check for deleted files that are still being held open by a process: sudo lsof | grep deleted | less That'll show the pid and file descriptor. Find's -path doesn't exclude paths, it means "do not report any matches whose name matches this path". Fast Linux file count for a large number of files. find /NAS/logs -type d -path '/NAS/logs/. – elimirks Commented Jan 29, 2014 at 16:14 @dogbane answer is right. find /path/to/directory -type f -exec du -hs {} \;| sort -rh | head -n 1. txt Cardacq. Let me show you how. What is the correct way to do it? You probably want to limit the depth of the inner find's search to avoid printing the parents of the directories that contain more than n files whose size is greater than x. , 1K 234M 2G) -d, --max-depth=N print the total for a directory (or file, with --all) only if it is N or fewer levels below the command line argument; --max-depth=0 is the same as --summarize -t, --threshold=SIZE exclude entries exclude directories during find. Close Menu. there are a number of folders that have a "statistics" directory and ". It uses the following syntax: To accurately count the files found by find, you should count something other than the file names (which can include newlines), e. For directories, that will never be more than 10M, so the find result will simply be empty. For that, we use the -o option. If you only want to search a specific I want to copy over all html files in a nested directory but I want to prevent the parent folders above it from being generated as well. the extentions are dummy and represent a bunch of files with various types; I have hundreds of dir1 and dir2; each dir* is very large and its not efficient to This will exclude top directory (and also sub directories), and now you can apply whatever command that we want to apply over it. My generic command would look For simplicity we have put all three directories within a sample directory so that all the files in the system are not searched, otherwise, the list would be too long. text -- bar. The following command will find all files larger than 100MB in the /home directory: This doesn't answer your question, but for the task of finding non-hidden files I like to let find find all the files then filter with grep. But, I almost always have super large network shares mounted and these are included in the search. ; The expression attribute is made up of options, search patterns, and actions separated by operators. Combine ‘find’ with To find all large files in the root filesystem in Linux, you can utilize the “find”, “du”, and “ncdu” commands. In our earlier example, both /mnt/nfsx and /mnt/nsfw will be listed, but the search wouldn’t descend below these directories. cpp doesn't work either. out . txt folder3 file2. What you want is -prune (from man find):-prune True; if the file is a directory, do not descend into it. Now note that -prune is an action that always returns true. find A/ B/ -name \*. cpp this will exclude file1. To find the 10 biggest files and folders in current directory: du -ah | sort -hr | head -n 10. ; The path attribute defines the starting directory or directories where find will search the files. prune option in the find command is the one for excluding a directory within a directory tree. This tutorial will guide you through the process of excluding files and directories from the du command output in Linux. png This will exclude the file in the base directory with the name tower. Finally I hand over the results to a third command which will perform the actions, like rm to remove files for example. How can I handle spaces in file names when using xargs on find results? 0. From your case, it sounds like - always the filename starts with a word file***. du -sh * can see size of all subdirectories, but it only gets current folder. tar --exclude=main_dir/dir1 -cvzf tarred_file. Further, we will see how you can use the command while excluding the directories in Linux. find $dir -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*. file-name -print -o -prune If you need to -exec something, such as to delete the How to exclude directory from find results if any of its parent directories contain a specific file 2 find: exclude n different directories and m different files present at any level but include few files from some excluded directories Use find to search files, Execute grep on all of them. Skipping du -ah doesn't list any files. One of the reasons behind the popularity of the rsync utility is the option to exclude specific files and directories from the synchronization process. Under the Linux command line, we can use the find command to get a list of files or directories. git files and store in array exclude_dirs=($(find . For example, if you want to exclude . After setting up fslint, go to cd /usr/share/fslint/fslint && . Now I want to do the same but want to exclude a particular file. -type f | grep -v '/\. Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge linux find and rename items That just gives me a list of the 10 largest files in the directory, but not the largest . exts from the find ouput? Notes. ! -name '*. You should have a look at the -type option of find in the manual:-type c File is of type c: b block (buffered) special c character (unbuffered) special d directory p named pipe (FIFO) f regular file l symbolic link; this is never true if the -L option or the -fol‐ low option is in effect, unless the symbolic link is broken. to find the largest use find and tree command that is use find's prune to exclude directories of search and use tree -P for searching the pattern. Then you would add the other conditions, Within a single directory level, finding the largest file is straightforward with the ls command. I know that you can just specify the directories to Did you try looking at the manual? The option you are looking for is -maxdepth, as @StevenPenny already wrote. When working with the Linux find command, you might need to search for files or directories while excluding certain directories from your search results. Explicitly specifying the OR operator fixes it, either This isn't easy. sort -n -r sorts the output numerically and reverses the order to show the largest files at the top. For reference, it took 4. cpp", would work just as well). c files. I am trying to exclude hidden files and folders when doing a find in linux. Modified 7 years, 6 months ago. (For particular scenario as questioned, you don't need this). \( -wholename "*/ignoredPath" -o -wholename "*/ignoredPath2" \) -prune -o -name "*. ) is a glob qualifier, . is optional when using find command for current directory Edit: As Eric Renouf notes, if your version of find doesn't support the -delete From man find, in the -path section, apparently combining the other 2 answers. (. First, we’ll create an exclude_file. du -ch --exclude=relative/path/to/uploads --exclude other/path/to/exclude Here are some tips for ignoring or excluding certain files while running the Linux or UNIX find command. You can create a shell script to handle the skipping logic and run commands on the files found (make it executable with chmod, replace To exclude specific paths, on Linux: find / -path /sys -prune -o -path /proc -prune -o -type d Another approach is to tell find not to recurse under different filesystems. Exclude files and directories with rsync. -type f -exec ls -s {} + | sort -n -r | head -3. I would like to find and change user account and it's default group on local File Systems but exclude massive NFS mounts and symbolic links to those mounts. Find all files larger than 100MB or 1GB in root file system. Ask Question Asked 15 years, 3 months ago. Usually, we want to do some operations on the files we found, for instance, find and tar files. mydirs --no-recursion but was wondering if I could use find in the same way. zip -r file. Save them to an array and then do a find of all files, compare the files in the array with the files find locate (when searching for all files) – find -size checks the inode size only (remember, directories are also just "files"), not the directory contents. Is there an easy way to exclude those in the find command, grep and other similar commands? Example: find / -name . Matching Note that du reports the disk usage of files, not their size (unless you use the --apparent-size option of the GNU implementation of du (or -b, another GNU extension which is short for --apparent-size --block-size=1)). There can be cases where you are searching for a file but you want to exclude some particular directories from the search. The thing is that if you are doing something like find / -exec grep, you can mess up the system real bad if you crawl some of these systems. -printf '%s %p\n'| sort -nr | head -10 However this provides output in KB only. c' doesn't work either. sudo du -a --exclude='/mnt/volume-nyc1-01/*' / | sort -n -r | head -n 100 However in this case a better This brief tutorial describes how to find the largest files, directories, and subdirectories disk usage in the Linux file system using the du and find command. As mentioned above ncdu supports a -x flag which you'll probably want to pass in order to exclude other mounted filesystems under /. I had this exact problem on a server, nothing in ncdu but disk filling up. The find command is very versatile and can be utilized to find large files. png" from "temp" folder: rm temp/Default. It turned out to be a nightly process that moved files to a mounted samba share and occasionally didn't close out the file handle correctly, it seems. png. So you can add | grep -P "\d+G" at the end. -type f -exec echo \; | wc -l. And, to exclude directories with a specific name at Excluding directories from the find command’s search can significantly streamline your file searches and improve efficiency. For example, finding large JPEG files: find /home -type f -name find -type f \( -name "*zip" -o -name "*tar" -o -name "*gz" \) -size +1M -delete the \( \) construct allows to group different filename patterns; by using -delete option, we can avoid piping and troubles with xargs See this, this and this. $ find . log' source/ destination/ Exclude files and directories in find command; In this tutorial, you will learn how to exclude files, directories, and sub-directories from search using 'find' command. c, . Great! But now what if I do not want to look at folder D? Can I try something like: find * not D/* -name hi. Using the find Command. Since this matches against the whole path to each file (relative to one of the starting directories) you can write a regex that matches both paths ending with your file name and those having that name I want to write a cleanup routine for my make file that removes every thing except the necessary source files in my folder. Then you would add the other conditions, File Structure. By far, this is the most common and simple way to search for a directory where you know the name of the directory and where to find it and that's it! To find directories using their names, you can use Using the du Command to Find Largest Files and Directories. /misc: To exclude multiple directories, OR them between parentheses. In this article of find command, we will use how to use the prune option of the I want to compress a directory in Linux. It is a complex command and has a large number of options, arguments, and modes. /something/here' find /etc -path '/etc/init. Sometimes, you may need to find the size of a specific file or directory on your Linux system. -maxdepth 1 ! -name . This isn't easy. There are files containing _c but none ends with _c. txt file: $ touch exclude_file. -type f ! -path '. I am familiar with using tar and exclude/include files: tar zcf backup. – I'd like to find all the ". This command will list all the files in the specified directory and print out the size of each file in human-readable format. text when I run my command I'd like to see:. It is evaluated in a standard short-circuiting manner -- meaning the evaluation is stopped as soon as the result is known, without the need to evaluate all parts (e. gz script. txt' --exclude='dir1/*' --exclude='dir2' src_directory Such files are found by comparing file sizes and MD5 signatures, followed by a byte-by-byte comparison. In this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at Method 3: Count files recursively using the find. For example, my folder contains files with the following extensions: . head Shows the 6 first lines of the previous output Firstly, using the ls command pointed to the targeted directory. This gives you the power of find to find files. with -path) so different tests are performed for different paths. $ find dir-name/* -name file-name -print -o -prune If you need to find a . Use -type d to indicate that you are specifically looking for directories, not files. destinationFolder/ In addition I would like to chmod all folders and subfolders within a specific folder, except I wish to exclude one folder (and all subfolders it contains). ' -exec rm -rf {} +, for example (all files/folders are empty since created just for the example): For example, if I have a directory A and one sub directory A/a that contains tens of thousands of sub directories, I want to use the find command to list all the sub directories of A excluding all the sub directories of A/a but not excluding A/a itself. To exclude more I use "|" to seperate file/directory names: I'd like to find all the ". Provide details and share your research! But avoid . Common Find Exclusion Pitfalls. Next let‘s go over some key pitfalls to avoid. e $ find / -xdev. Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers. To list all the files in my directory, excluding the specified directories. out' -o '. hdf . The result from the output is clear that dir3 was excluded and all the remaining directories were printed. These are directories in which the OS creates files which are not really files. o . txt . git directory, but ignoring its contents (when used with -R ) – Brandon As we know, cp -r source_dir intended_new_directory creates a copy of source directory with a new name. 20160 /home/user/userfile How can I change this command to show me results in MB, or GB? Irrelevant. The du command either shows files and folders (default) or just the sizes of all items which you specify on the command line (option -s). text instead of: Second, copy all files from your original folder to "temp" folder: "-R" flag can copy exactly all files including "Symbolic Links" cp -R originalFolder/. sudo find ~ -iname "*s40*" ! -path "*timeshift*" this command searches in the Home directory /home/username and finds files (or directories) containing the text s40 but ignores all paths containing the text timeshift A find expression is composed primarily of tests and actions joined together with operators. – Jonathan Leffler. gz that it turns to be a big file, due to the reason that the directory contains some *. *. If so, you can start to find the large files/directories of the /myfilesystem filesystem to clean up. To get the largest items (files and folders), sorted, with human readable sizes on Linux: du -h | sort find . Save them to an array and then do a find of all files, compare the files in the array with the files find locate (when searching for all files) – Fast Linux file count for a large number of files. This uses a number of extension in GNU find, but since the question is tagged Linux, that is not a problem. Is there any way to compress a directory but exclude files larger than a predefined SIZE? There is a --exclude argument in tar command, however I would like to reject files larger than 1 MB. I was using find with grep to exclude the directory but the parent "ignoring first-level dotfiles" also To find the largest 10 directories: find . gif This will exclude all the files in the base directory with '. gif' extension. Here, I’m searching for all the files which has ‘file’ in their name, in the current directory. The -type f argument Learn the different methods to find large files in Linux using the find, du, and ncdu commands. cpp will find all the files, and I tried find A/ B/ ! -name file1. Ask Question Asked 7 years, 6 months ago. With the find command, you can Exclude Specific Directories From Copying In Linux. txt AcctTrnInq. I had tried multiple syntaxes but did not succeed - find / -user dummyadm -print \( -fstype nfs -o type l \) -prune Please help! Exclude files and directories from a list. Putting it together you end up with something like: grep -rio --exclude={filenames comma separated} \ --exclude-dir={directory names comma separated} <search term> <location> Describing it makes it sound far more complicated than it actually is. Read on! Working with the Find Command. -type d can be used to find all directories below some start point. In short, the -xdev flag of the find command will print but not traverse paths that are mount points. to exclude whole directory. Stack Exchange Network. print -rC1 ${(0)^"$(locate -0 )"}(N. ; To search for files in a directory, the user invoking the There is no simple command available to find out the largest files/directories on a Linux/UNIX/BSD filesystem. -path '. Excluding Files or Directories. /var/log) , you can use the following command Try this: ls -SrqL /usr/bin | head -6 -S makes it sorted by file size-r for reverse order-q to print ? instead of nongraphic characters (line breaks included)-L when showing file information for a symbolic link, this shows information for the file the link references rather than for the link itself. udev directory, you can do: find /dev Linux find largest file in directory recursively using find. How could I exclude specified folders in 'grep' When we search for files in Unix/Linux using the find command, we might want to search for files only in some specific directories, OR to search in all directories except a particular directory and so on. To accomplish this, generate a text file containing the names of the files and directories you wish to exclude. -prune is used to ignore files and directories from your search Lets see some examples Exclude "work" directory Example: Finding Large Files. When it comes to finding the largest files in Linux, the find command is an incredibly useful tool. I tried many variations of -prune using the answers in this question to no avail. Directory meta-data simply doesn't hold enough information about their children and children's children to avoid scanning all sub-directories and files individually and creating a disk usage tally. ) at the end of the array, we add it to each element. Trying to use -regex '*. dat . Don't use -type f,l since it will also include symbolic directory links. I have found some related answers here, using tar and rsync, but in those solutions I need to create the destination directory first (using mkdir). Note that the star is escaped with a backslash to prevent it from being expanded by the shell (quoting it, such as --include="*. Let‘s focus specifically on Linux and the versatile find command. symvers. gif. zip * -x "dir1" -x "dir2" -x "file1" -x "file2" It Introduction The find command in Linux is an incredibly powerful tool that allows you to search for files and directories based on various criteria such as name, size, type, and modification date. git" | xargs -i dirname {})) # set up the base command command="find . Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn With GNU find (i. When I used the find command, I almost always need to search the local drives. In this article, we’ll explore the du command, its basic You probably want to limit the depth of the inner find's search to avoid printing the parents of the directories that contain more than n files whose size is greater than x. F03 . This example will match all files (-type f) somewhere under the directory wizard. But it returns the current directory (. The most common use of the find command is to search for files using either a regular expression or the complete filename(s) to be searched. /vboxdrv-Module. The current user cannot read this file; try cat file. dat? I do not want to type: find A/* B/* C/* -name because I obviously have more than three folders and those were just used as an For example, if I want to move all files/directories - except a specified file or directory - inside "var/www/html" to a sub-folder named "my_sub_domain", then I use "mv" with the command "!(what_to_exclude)": $ cd /var/www/html $ mv !(my_sub_domain) my_sub_domain. Excluding multiple directories: We can also exclude multiple paths if we want to : With zsh:. . TLDR: For a given path, how do I find the size of all files or directories at depth=1, without expanding any underneath symlinks? In Linux, the find command is used to search for files or folders from the command line. Commented Jan 3, 2013 at 2:47. js' -exec ls -l {} \; I would like it to exclude any deeply nested folder that matches a certain pattern e. find command to find php files but exclude a certain directory. If you are certain that the file or folder that you You can try with grep like this (the folder here is named test_folder): find . By default, rsync will transfer all files and directories over to the specified destination. Is there a way to exclude the directory and all its subdirectories from find? You can use the -path option to find and combine it with the -not operator. But even this is irrelevant. It ensures that if there are no files to search, grep will think there is one file and not hang waiting on stdin. snapshot' -prune -o -type f -mtime +7 \( -name 'developer_*' -o -name '*_c*' \) -print. In Linux, find is the workhorse for locating files via the command line or scripts. login, then the command should be $ find dir-name/. mydirs --exclude-from=exclude. It will still descend into the directories and will search them. More find examples :Linux find command examples I've been using the command below which works well for finding the largest files in a certain folder. If you also want to include symlinks that point to a file, use -L: find -L <optional_directory_path> -type f. find -L . Let’s see how to use an exclude file to ignore specific files and directories while archiving. By far, this is the most common and simple way to search for a directory where you know the name of the directory and where to find it and that's it! To find directories using their names, you can use None of your example files satifies the second of the filename criteria you have specified. xml. Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge Linux find - exclude parent To exclude files use --exclude and to exclude directories use --exclude-dir. bck, bak, ~, or backup. Serch files by Size in Linux. Narrowing down the search scope. -name 'file*. If all you want is the ten biggest files just do As Linux users, we frequently perform various operations on file systems. py" file using command: find / -iregex ". The directory also contains lots of sub folders. txt CardHold. g. Use -name Pattern if you want to grep only certain files: find /path/to/somewhere/ -type f -name \*. cpp from the B folder as well. In (2) the exclusion refers to a full sub-directory. This method is not 100% right because some directory names may match too if they have digit followed by G in their names. txt. Assuming you meant contains you can construct the find command like this:. This capability is incredibly useful when dealing with large data For example, if looking for application log files, you can exclude directories like /home and /var/www where logs aren‘t stored. f . -type f: Specifies the I would like to find and change user account and it's default group on local File Systems but exclude massive NFS mounts and symbolic links to those mounts. To list the directory contents in descending file size order, use the ls command along with the -IS argument. To use the find command, you will need to specify the path of the file or directory that you want to check. 10KB) in a specific folder (eg. I have to exclude files or folders that start with a dot (. true or anything is evaluated to true). Home; Linux; Windows; Security; Exam Guides. cpp in the A folder. if your find supports -printf: find . -type d : List only directory types. Therefore, I always end up using a combination of find just for the recursive file search and grep to make the actual exculsion/inclusion stuff. Use the prune switch, for example if you want to exclude the misc directory just add a -path . Find the total size used by the files and folder. In the Linux operating system, the du command is a powerful tool for analyzing disk usage and identifying space-consuming files and directories. ls /some/path/here | find . txt ) After that, loop through all files in the directory you want to exclude, checking if the filename is in the array you don't want to exclude; if its not then delete the However, within the hierarchy, there is one directory that is full of files that get updated on a near minute-by-minute basis, that makes the above command near useless for finding files outside of the offending directory. I knew how to delete files and exclude some, like this: rm `find ~/temporary/Test\ 1 -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1|grep -v 'A'` but the problem is the folder 'Test 1' containing a Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted ├── sub\ 1 │ ├── one │ ├── three I tried running cd /fs && find -maxdepth 1 -type d | sudo xargs du -hs but this expands the symlinks underneath, which means the size of /fs/edir would include the content and size of /usr/local/bin in this case. zip * -x dir1 -x dir2 -x file1 -x file2 or this one. If you tell me you cannot do it after reading the linked answer then I will probably write an answer I am using find to locate and delete backup files but wish to exclude certain directories from the search. * matches any file or directory starting with a . $ find <directory> -type f | wc -l. txt In Above files I am using ls | grep -E "^Acct" command to get only the files starting with Acct, But it is considering the directories This post covers what the “find” command is and how it works. If -depth is given, then -prune has no effect. However, combination of following three commands (using pipes) you can easily find out list of largest files: # du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10 If you want more human readable output try: The "find" solutions above lose some of the capabilities of ls - for example: list only files, sorted in descending modification time. /test/bar. I can use this: find / -not -path /my/path -name name But this still keep looking at all subdirectories of /my/path. -type d" # loop over each element in array by index for i in $(seq 0 $(expr ${#exclude_dirs[@]} - 1)); do As always in Linux, there's more than one way to get the job done. Linux - find - How to exclude a directory. To count files recursively on Linux, use the find command and pipe it with the wc command to count the number of files. To find the largest files in a directory, you can use the following command: use filters to exclude certain file types, automate the process with scripts, and monitor disk space usage over time. This is useful if you’re aware of certain files that you want to exclude from the results as you may not want to investigate some set The ‘-exec’ flag allows for additional commands, like ‘ls -sh’, to display file details. Visit Stack Exchange Inside the /tmp I want to find files older than 180 day, but I also want to exclude some folders from the search like . The procedure to find largest files including directories in Linux is as follows: Open the terminal application; Login as root The simplest way to acomplish that task (find files in a folder excluding all subdirectories) would be. Find the largest directories and files in Linux. I wanted to recursively delete everything within a directory except for 1 sub directory. Use -prune. So far I have the following command which seems to work but maybe there is a more elegant way? To find the 10 biggest folders in current directory: du -h | sort -hr | head -n 10. h files, but omitting matches containing certain substrings. Visit Stack Exchange Find large files in Linux via comamnd line. Among these directories are /proc /sys /run. By using the -prune option or combining the find command with the ! (negation) operator, Is there a way to exclude these depth-1 file. . These commands have multiple options to specify the size limit, sorting order, and path directory to display in the terminal. ; done" innersh Problems: (1) This will exclude every file named content, possibly somewhere deep in the directory tree, not only the specific directory in question. sql info. I might need to divide into many subdirs respectively and recursively to get who are the culprits I need. I found that useful while running a time-consuming command (file /dir -exec md5sum {} \;). huiu dkjht kdxitm uqxkq lsnowp akvow rlmgxg smcap ojhz xgwsx