Why does find . -not -name “.*” not exclude hidden files?

Question

I want to ignore all hidden files, but especially .git and .svn ones when searching (and later replacing) files, not I have found that the most basic way to exclude such hid

Answer 1

The thing is -not -name ".*" does match all files and directories that start with anything but "." - but it doesn't prune them from the search, so you'll get matches from inside hidden directories. To prune paths use -prune, i.e.:

find $PWD -name ".*" -prune -o -print

(I use $PWD because otherwise the start of the search "." would also be pruned and there would be no output)