How to only find files in a given directory, and ignore subdirectories using bash

Solution 1:

If you just want to limit the find to the first level you can do:

 find /dev -maxdepth 1 -name 'abc-*'

... or if you particularly want to exclude the .udev directory, you can do:

 find /dev -name '.udev' -prune -o -name 'abc-*' -print

Is there any particular reason that you need to use find? You can just use ls to find files that match a pattern in a directory.

ls /dev/abc-*

If you do need to use find, you can use the -maxdepth 1 switch to only apply to the specified directory.

This may do what you want:

find /dev \( ! -name /dev -prune \) -type f -print

I got here with a bit more general problem - I wanted to find files in directories matching pattern but not in their subdirectories.

My solution (assuming we're looking for all cpp files living directly in arch directories):

find . -path "*/arch/*/*" -prune -o -path "*/arch/*.cpp" -print

I couldn't use maxdepth since it limited search in the first place, and didn't know names of subdirectories that I wanted to exclude.