How to prevent find traversing certain directories, but still list them?

Question

I have the following folder structure:

example/
├── bar/
│   ├── 1
│   ├── 2
│   ├── 3
│   ├── 4
│   ├── 5.txt
│   ├── bar.mylib/
│   │   ├── 1
│   │   ├── 2
│   │   ├── 3
│   │   ├── 4
│   │   ├── 5
│   │   ├── 6
│   │   └── foo/
│   │       ├── 1
│   │       ├── 3
│   │       └── 5
│   └── foo.mylib
└── foo/
    ├── 1
    ├── 3
    ├── 5
    └── node_modules/
        ├── 1
        ├── 2
        ├── 3
        ├── 4
        └── 5

5 directories, 23 files

I want to build a find command that would list all the files and directories, but excluding specific directory name patterns, without entering in those directories at all, but still include the directory names in the output.

The following output is expected:

example/
example/foo/
example/foo/3
example/foo/5
example/foo/1
example/foo/node_modules/
example/bar/
example/bar/5.txt
example/bar/3
example/bar/4
example/bar/1
example/bar/bar.mylib/
example/bar/foo.mylib
example/bar/2

I tried the following:

find . -type f ! -path '*/*.mylib/*' ! -path '*/node_modules/*'

This kind of works, but it seems to enter in those directories that are ignored. Also, it is not listing the ignored directories (namely example/foo/node_modules/ and example/bar/bar.mylib/).

I intentionally have two .mylib paths: one is directory and the other is a file. I want to list both, but ignore the content of the directory.

How can we do this with find?

Answer 1

The strategy is to prune all directories matching your node_modules or *.mylib (prune means to not descend into them) and print all other files.

find . -print \( -type d \( -name 'node_modules' -o -name '*.mylib' \) -prune \)

Consult Find's specification or the manual if any of the above options is foreign to you.