How to use '-prune' option of 'find' in sh?

user_115622 0
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I don't quite understand the example given from the man find, can anyone give me some examples and explanations? Can I combine regular expression in it?

The more detailed question is like this:

Write a shell script, changeall, which has an interface like changeall [-r|-R] "string1" "string2". It will find all files with an suffix of .h, .C, .cc, or .cpp and change all occurrences of string1 to string2. -r is option for staying in current dir only or including subdir's.

NOTE:

  1. For non-recursive case, ls is NOT allowed, we could only use find and sed.
  2. I tried find -depth but it was NOT supported. That's why I was wondering if -prune could help, but didn't understand the example from man find.

EDIT2: I was doing assignment, I didn't ask question in great details because I would like to finish it myself. Since I already done it and hand it in, now I can state the whole question. Also, I managed to finish the assignment without using -prune, but would like to learn it anyway.

manual find shell regex
10 Answers

I am no expert at this (and this page was very helpful along with http://mywiki.wooledge.org/UsingFind)

Just noticed -path is for a path that fully matches the string/path that comes just after find (. in theses examples) where as -name matches all basenames.

find . -path ./.git  -prune -o -name file  -print

blocks the .git directory in your current directory ( as your finding in . )

find . -name .git  -prune -o -name file  -print

blocks all .git subdirectories recursively.

Note the ./ is extremely important!! -path must match a path anchored to . or whatever comes just after find if you get matches with out it (from the other side of the or '-o') there probably not being pruned! I was naively unaware of this and it put me of using -path when it is great when you don't want to prune all subdirectory with the same basename :D

user_7903590

find builds a list of files. It applies the predicate you supplied to each one and returns those that pass.

This idea that -prune means exclude from results was really confusing for me. You can exclude a file without prune:

find -name 'bad_guy' -o -name 'good_guy' -print  // good_guy

All -prune does is alter the behavior of the search. If the current match is a directory, it says "hey find, that file you just matched, dont descend into it". It just removes that tree (but not the file itself) from the list of files to search.

It should be named -dont-descend.

user_41590070

There are quite a few answers; some of them are a bit too much theory-heavy. I'll leave why I needed prune once so maybe the need-first/example kind of explanation is useful to someone :)

Problem

I had a folder with about 20 node directories, each having its node_modules directory as expected.

Once you get into any project, you see each ../node_modules/module. But you know how it is. Almost every module has dependencies, so what you are looking at is more like projectN/node_modules/moduleX/node_modules/moduleZ...

I didn't want to drown with a list with the dependency of the dependency of...

Knowing -d n / -depth n, it wouldn't have helped me, as the main/first node_modules directory I wanted of each project was at a different depth, like this:

Projects/MysuperProjectName/project/node_modules/...
Projects/Whatshisname/version3/project/node_modules/...
Projects/project/node_modules/...
Projects/MysuperProjectName/testProject/november2015Copy/project/node_modules/...
[...]

How can I get the first a list of paths ending at the first node_modules and move to the next project to get the same?

Enter -prune

When you add -prune, you'll still have a standard recursive search. Each "path" is analyzed, and every find gets spit out and find keeps digging down like a good chap. But it's the digging down for more node_modules what I didn't want.

So, the difference is that in any of those different paths, -prune will find to stop digging further down that particular avenue when it has found your item. In my case, the node_modules folder.

user_24953410
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