How to exclude a directory in find . command

Question

I\'m trying to run a find command for all JavaScript files, but how do I exclude a specific directory?

Here is the find code we\'re using.<

Answer 1

I was using find to provide a list of files for xgettext, and wanted to omit a specific directory and its contents. I tried many permutations of -path combined with -prune but was unable to fully exclude the directory which I wanted gone.

Although I was able to ignore the contents of the directory which I wanted ignored, find then returned the directory itself as one of the results, which caused xgettext to crash as a result (doesn't accept directories; only files).

My solution was to simply use grep -v to skip the directory that I didn't want in the results:

find /project/directory -iname '*.php' -or -iname '*.phtml' | grep -iv '/some/directory' | xargs xgettext

Whether or not there is an argument for find that will work 100%, I cannot say for certain. Using grep was a quick and easy solution after some headache.