Pruning directories from find

I have no idea why, but for some reason I always have a hard time remembering the exact syntax for find when I want to prune some list of directories from a search.

Let’s say that you want to execute a find in a directory where there are a lot of .git directories and you don’t want to search through the guts of the repo directories. With the following command we specify the prune predicate ahead of the search for any file that has ‘*.json’ in the file name.

find ./ -type f -iwholename '*.git' -prune -o -name '*.json' -print

Another way to do it is to exclude specific directories from a search. With the following command we first specify a set of directories to exclude from the search, by specific path and name, and then execute a search for the specific files.

find ./ -type d \( -path ./grpc-java -o -path ./go-in-mem-datastore \) -prune -o -name '*.json' -print