GREP Excluding Hidden Directories from being scanned
 

I wrote a script in Bash and have a line where is does a find and includes the directories that I want and excludes the directories that I dont.

All works fine but when I attempt to add the directory where I want to avoid being backed up (space constraints), it either blocks everything from being copied or doesnt work in excluding the hidden directories. This is the statement that I am adding to the exclude file:

??

Did you try with the * removed ?

(edit)
Try:

thanks for the reply,

I can successfully use:

which works great but I would like to control everything from a exclude file. So inside of the exclude file, I have attempted:

but without success. I am using this inside of a bash shell script and when I attempt to use:

but my logging goes crazy thought is works well. I would like to control what I need to exclude via an exclusion file and in this case, the "exclude". My goal is to exclude all of the hidden directories from my search.

In this case, I would just update the exclude file before, with
Then process with the find line:

grep uses regular expressions, find -name uses glob patterns. To exclude hidden files with regexps use:
Which means "slash followed by dot", the dot has to be escaped because it normally means "any character".

Awesome stuff,

I ended doing this and all worked like a charm

to find the hidden files and

for the directories. Is there a way to just put a oneliner in "/home/testuser/exclude" that will exclude all hidden files and or directories instead of putting each hidden file and directories inside of the file itself?

The ntubski's suggestion doesn't work ?