Exclude hidden files when searching with Unix/Linux find?

Question

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

Answer 1

I found this here:

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

Answer 2

It seems negation glob pattern is not well known. So you can use:

find . -name "[!.]*"

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Try the following find usage:

find . -type f -not -path '*/\.*'

Which would ignore all the hidden files (files and directories starting with a dot).

Answer 5

fd

Use fd, a simple, much faster and user-friendly alternative to find. By default, it:

• Ignores hidden directories and files, by default.
• Ignores patterns from your .gitignore, by default.

Check the Benchmark analysis.

Answer 6

If you aims is to find and grep, ripgrep does exclude hidden files by default, e.g.

rg --files

--files Print each file that would be searched without actually performing the search.

Answer 7

To find hidden files:

find -name '[.]*'

To find visible files:

find -name '[!.]*'

It is that simple.

Answer 8

I wrote a script called findnh which I believe handles certain edge cases better than the answers to this question that I've been able to find on the web.

#!/bin/bash

declare -a paths

while [ $# -ne 0 ]; do
  case "$1" in -*) break ;; esac
  paths+=("$1")
  shift
done

find "${paths[@]}" \( -name . -o -name .. -o \! \( -name '.*' -prune \) \) "$@"

For example, you can find non-hidden files and directories inside of an explicitly-specified hidden directory with a command like findnh ~/.hiddendir/, which will show ~/.hiddendir/file but not ~/.hiddendir/.superhiddenfile.