How do I exclude a folder when performing file operations i.e. cp, mv, rm and chown etc. in Linix

Question

How do you exclude a folder when performing file operations i.e. cp etc.

I would currently use the wild card * to apply file operation to all, but I need to exclude one single folder.

The command I'm actually wanting to use is chown to change the owner of all the files in a directory but I need to exclude one sub directory.

Answer 1

for file in *
  if [ $file != "file_I_dont_want_to_chown" ]
    then
      chown -R Camsoft $file
  fi
done 

Answer 2

Combine multiple small sharp tools of unix: To exclude the folder "foo"

% ls -d * | grep -v foo | xargs -d "\n" chown -R Camsoft

Answer 3

If you're using bash and enable extglob via shopt -s extglob then you can use !(<pattern>) to exclude the given pattern.

Answer 4

Another option might be to temporarily remove permission on the that file /folder.
In Unix you need 'x' permission on a directory to enter it.

edit: obviously this isn't goign to work if you are backing up a live production database - but for excluding your 'interesting images' collection when copying documents to a USB key it's reasoanable.

Answer 5

find dir_to_start -name dir_to_exclude -prune -o -print0 | xargs -0 chown owner

find dir_to_start -not -name "file_to_exclude"  -print0 | xargs -0 chown owner

Answer 6

For this situation I would recommend using find. You can specify paths to exclude using the -not -iwhilename 'PATH'. Then using exec you execute the command you want to execute

find . -not -iwholename './var/foo*' -exec chown www-data '{}' \;

Although this probably does help for your situation I have also see scripts set the immutable flag. Make sure you remove the flag when your done you should use trap for this just in case the script is killed early (note: run from a script, the trap code runs when the bash session exits). A lot of trouble in my option but it's good in some situations.

cd /var
trap 'chattr -R -i foo > /dev/null 2>&1' 0
chattr -R +i foo
chown -R www-data *