how to list files that are NOT open using find command

Question

I want to "list" all the files that are NOT open, within a certain directory using the GNU find command. Now, I am able to list the files that are open, but can't figure out a way to do the inverse of it.

find /my/dir/* -exec lsof {} \;  

Any ideas how this can be done?

Answer 1

find /my/dir -type f | while read filename ; do fuser -s $filename || echo $filename ; done

This uses find just to generate a list of files. Then the while loop iterates over the list of results, for each result it runs fuser -s $filename which will exit with success if something is using the file.

The || echo $filename part means "if fuser failed (meaning nobody is using the file), echo the filename"