shell commands - exclusion

[Paul Procacci]

Chris Whitehouse wrote:
> Jaime wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 9:35 AM, t-u-t <marshc187 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> if i have say one (or even two) single file/directories among many 
>> others,
>> and i want to perform any said function like cp, mv, rm, etc.. , to all
>> other files except that one or two, is there a way to do that in a 
>> single
>> command?
>> e.g
>> rm -r * {-except foo1 foo15}
>
> I think you should be able to do it with a combination of -prune and 
> -delete (or -exec rm -rf {} \; ) on a find command. Substitute your 
> other commands for rm -rf in the -exec above.
>
> I would give you a working example except I can't figure out the 
> syntax for -prune. Examples from google don't seem to work in (my) 
> FreeBSD.
>
> chrisw at pcbsd% find .
> ..
> ../test.mov
> ../test.mpg
> ../dir1
> ../dir1/file1
> ../dir1/file2
> ../file3
> chrisw at pcbsd% find . -print
> ..
> ../test.mov
> ../test.mpg
> ../dir1
> ../dir1/file1
> ../dir1/file2
> ../file3
> chrisw at pcbsd% find . -print -o -prune dir1
> find: dir1: unknown option
> chrisw at pcbsd% find . -print -o -prune -name dir1
> ..
> ../test.mov
> ../test.mpg
> ../dir1
> ../dir1/file1
> ../dir1/file2
> ../file3
> chrisw at pcbsd% find . -print -o -name dir1 -prune
> ..
> ../test.mov
> ../test.mpg
> ../dir1
> ../dir1/file1
> ../dir1/file2
> ../file3
> chrisw at pcbsd% find . -o -name dir1 -prune
> find: -o: no expression before -o
> chrisw at pcbsd% find . -name "*" -o -name dir1 -prune
> ..
> ../test.mov
> ../test.mpg
> ../dir1
> ../dir1/file1
> ../dir1/file2
> ../file3
> chrisw at pcbsd%
>
> (Please don't tell me to read the man page, I have several times. Even 
> Aeleen Frisch says it is impenetrable :P)
>
> Chris
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find . \! -name blah -a \! -name blah2 -delete

no?