find combine many names and paths in one command

Question

I have a rather complex set of files to be found and reacted upon (e.g. paths copied to a text file):

For example:

 find / \( -iname "*ssh*" -or -iname "*scp*" \) \( -not -path -"/run" -not -path "/rw/*" -and -not -path "/home/*" -and -not -path "*/qml/*" \) >> ~/files.txt

Here I want to find all files or folders that are related to "ssh" and "scp" but not in /run or in /rw directories.

I will be adding more conditions to this, but the commands gets so long. How can I do this with regex?

Answer 1

Best would be not to descend at all in those directories you want to exclude rather than filtering out the files in there after the fact with ! -path <pattern>:

LC_ALL=C find / \
       '(' \
          -path /run -o  -path /rw -o -path /home -o -path '*/qml' \
       ')' -prune -o '(' \
          -name '*[sS][hH][hH]*' -o -name '*[sS][cC][pP]*' \
       ')' -print

Here using POSIX find syntax. With GNU find, that could be:

LC_ALL=C find / -regextype posix-extended \
  -regex '/home|/rw|.*/qml' -prune -o \
  -iregex '.*s(cp|sh)[^/]*' -print

With BSD find, you just use -E like in grep or sed to get POSIX EREs:

LC_ALL=C find -E / \
  -regex '/home|/rw|.*/qml' -prune -o \
  -iregex '.*s(cp|sh)[^/]*' -print

Answer 2

Here's a version with line breaks that's a bit easier to read, and with some typo fixes. I'm assuming GNU find, but minor modifications will work with most BSD finds as well.

find / \
     \( -iname "*ssh*" -or -iname "*scp*" \) \
     \( -not -path "/run/*" \
        -not -path "/rw/*" \
        -not -path "/home/*" \
        -not -path "*/qml/*" \) \
     >> ~/files.txt

Now to simplify it a bit, -iname "*ssh*" -or -iname "*scp*" can be written as a regex like

find ... \
     -regextype posix-extended \
     -iregex '.*(ssh|scp)[^/]*' \
     ...

and you can now more easily add extra names like (ssh|scp|rsync|...).

The -not -path tests can be combined into a regex like this:

find ... \
     -not -regex '(/run|/rw|/home|.*/qml)/.*'

but find will still waste a lot of time exploring those directories unless you use -prune:

find / \
     -regextype posix-extended \
     -not \( -regex '(/run|/rw|/home|.*/qml)/.*' -prune \) \
     -iregex '.*(ssh|scp)[^/]*' \
     >> ~/files.txt