Exclude hidden files when searching with Unix/Linux find?

Question

What options do I need to use with find to exclude hidden files?

Aside: the reason there isn't some special support for this task is that the only thing special about files named with a leading '.' is that there are not listed by ls unless specifically requested: they are completely ordinary files in every respect, its just that ls lets you ignore them by default.
Question: do you want to hide something like .hidden/visible.txt?

Dan · Answer 1 · 2010-06-15 21:23:28Z

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I found this here:

find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \) -type f -name "whatever"

answered Jun 15 '10 at 21:23

Dan
3,0161130

	Why not just `\( ! -name '.*' \)`? – grawity Jun 16 '10 at 15:15
	@grawity I just found that, I don't know entirely how it works. Would yours not only hide hidden files, but hidden directories and all their sub-content and hidden files in subfolders? – Dan Jun 16 '10 at 16:05
	No, it wouldn't :/ But `\( ! -path '/.' \)` would. – grawity Jun 16 '10 at 16:38
	@grawity Ya, I guess I made an assumption about what the OP wanted... Your -name solution is probably the closest to what they were asking for. – Dan Jun 16 '10 at 18:07
	@grawity&Dan: Isn't it ( !-path '^.*' ) ?? your solutions will ignore any file that has a '.' anywhere in the file name like a.exe, b.out etc.... – Anand Jeyahar Jun 30 '11 at 8:27

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Simon Chiang · Answer 2 · 2011-12-13 21:41:37Z

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.

find . -type f | grep -v '/\.'

Similar to your approach but perhaps a bit simpler.

teambob · Answer 3 · 2011-10-12 23:31:20Z

up vote 0 down vote

You can look at the -prune option

answered Oct 12 '11 at 23:31

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3 Answers