Why is find finding .git directories?

Question

I have the following find command and I'm surprised to see .git directories being found. Why?

$ find . ! -name '*git*' | grep git 
./.git/hooks
./.git/hooks/commit-msg
./.git/hooks/applypatch-msg.sample
./.git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg.sample
./.git/hooks/pre-applypatch.sample
./.git/hooks/commit-msg.sample
./.git/hooks/post-update.sample

The predicates apply to the last component of the pathname only. — Ingo, Oct 18 '13 at 22:30
This question appears to be off-topic because it is about Bash and would be a better fit at [unix.se]. — Cole Tobin, Oct 19 '13 at 01:38

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

Because find searches for files and none of the found files have the search pattern in their name (see the man page). You need to remove the offending directory via the -prune switch:

find . -path ./.git -prune -o -not -name '*git*' -print |grep git

See Exclude directory from find . command

[edit] An alternative without -prune (and much more natural imho):

find . -not -path "*git*" -not -name '*git*' |grep git

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 18 '13 at 22:33

1

You're just seeing expected behaviour of find. The -name test is only applied to the filename itself, not the whole path. If you want to search everything but the .git directory, you can use bash(1)'s extglob option:

$ shopt -s extglob
$ find !(.git)

answered Oct 18 '13 at 22:33

Carl Norum

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 18 '13 at 22:34

It doesn't really find those git-files. Instead it finds files under ./.git/ that match the pattern ! -name '*git*' which includes all files that don't include git in their filename (not path name).
Finds -name is about the files, not the path.

Try -iwholename instead of -name:
find . ! -iwholename '*git*'

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 18 '13 at 22:46

0

This is what I needed:

find . ! -path '*git*'

answered Oct 18 '13 at 22:46

Ankur Agarwal

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Why is find finding .git directories?

4 Answers4