find filenames NOT ending in specific extensions on Unix?

command-line find
Cristian Diaconescu picture Cristian Diaconescu · Aug 27, 2009 · Viewed 163.7k times · Source

Is there a simple way to recursively find all files in a directory hierarchy, that do not end in a list of extensions? E.g. all files that are not *.dll or *.exe

UNIX/GNU find, powerful as it is, doesn't seem to have an exclude mode (or I'm missing it), and I've always found it hard to use regular expressions to find things that don't match a particular expression.

I'm in a Windows environment (using the GnuWin32 port of most GNU tools), so I'm equally open for Windows-only solutions.

Answer

Hardy picture Hardy · Aug 27, 2009

Or without ( and the need to escape it:

find . -not -name "*.exe" -not -name "*.dll"

and to also exclude the listing of directories

find . -not -name "*.exe" -not -name "*.dll" -not -type d

or in positive logic ;-)

find . -not -name "*.exe" -not -name "*.dll" -type f

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