Exclude list of files from find

If I have a list of filenames in a text file that I want to exclude when I run find, how can I do that? For example, I want to do something like:

find /dir -name "*.gz" -exclude_from skip_files

and get all the .gz files in /dir except for the files listed in skip_files. But find has no -exclude_from flag. How can I skip all the files in skip_files?

I don't think find has an option like this, you could build a command using printf and your exclude list:

find /dir -name "*.gz" $(printf "! -name %s " $(cat skip_files))

Which is the same as doing:

find /dir -name "*.gz" ! -name first_skip ! -name second_skip .... etc

Alternatively you can pipe from find into grep:

find /dir -name "*.gz" | grep -vFf skip_files

This is what i usually do to remove some files from the result (In this case i looked for all text files but wasn't interested in a bunch of valgrind memcheck reports we have here and there):

find . -type f -name '*.txt' ! -name '*mem*.txt'

It seems to be working.

I think you can try like

find /dir \( -name "*.gz" ! -name skip_file1 ! -name skip_file2 ...so on \)

find /var/www/test/ -type f \( -iname "*.*" ! -iname  "*.php" ! -iname "*.jpg" ! -iname "*.png"  \)

The above command gives list of all files excluding files with .php, .jpg ang .png extension. This command works for me in putty.

Josh Jolly's grep solution works, but has O(N**2) complexity, making it too slow for long lists. If the lists are sorted first (O(N*log(N)) complexity), you can use comm, which has O(N) complexity:

find /dir -name '*.gz' |sort >everything_sorted
sort skip_files >skip_files_sorted
comm -23 everything_sorted skip_files_sorted | xargs . . . etc

man your computer's comm for details.

This solution will go through all files (not exactly excluding from the find command), but will produce an output skipping files from a list of exclusions. I found that useful while running a time-consuming command (file /dir -exec md5sum {} \;).

1. You can create a shell script to handle the skipping logic and run commands on the files found (make it executable with chmod, replace echo with other commands):

    $ cat skip_file.sh
    #!/bin/bash
    found=$(grep "^$1$" files_to_skip.txt)
    if [ -z "$found" ]; then
        # run your command
        echo $1
    fi

2. Create a file with the list of files to skip named files_to_skip.txt (on the dir you are running from).

3. Then use find using it:

    find /dir -name "*.gz" -exec ./skip_file.sh {} \;