Find, chown and exclude directories

Question

I would like to change the ownership of all files and directories but exclude some directories:

find -user test ! -path "./dir1/*" ! -path "./dir2/*" -exec chown -R root:root {} \;

The ownership of the excluded directories is still changed?

Regards

Answer 1

find . \( -path ./dir1 -o -path ./dir2 \) -prune -o -user test -exec chown root:root {} \;

Personally, for performance reasons, I prefer:

find . \( -path ./dir1 -o -path ./dir2 \) -prune -o -user test -print0 | xargs -0 chown root

Answer 2

Try this:

find . -user test | grep -v '^./dir1\|^./dir2' 

to check if the list is correct and

find . -user test | grep -v '^./dir1\|^./dir2' | xargs chown root:root

to do the rename.

Answer 3

On Mac OS X you can use the following version of the command posted by Sven:

find . | grep -v '^./@R*' | tr \\n \\0 | xargs -0 chown root:root