How to exclude/ignore hidden files and directories in a wildcard-embedded "find" search?

This prints all files that are descendants of your directory, skipping hidden files and directories:

find . -not -path '*/\.*'

So if you're looking for a file with some text in its name, and you want to skip hidden files and directories, run:

find . -not -path '*/\.*' -type f -name '*some text*'

Explanation:

The -path option runs checks a pattern against the entire path string. * is a wildcard, / is a directory separator, \. is a dot (it has to be escaped to avoid special meaning), and * is another wildcard. -not means don't select files that match this test.

I don't think that find is smart enough to avoid recursively searching hidden directories in the previous command, so if you need speed, use -prune instead, like this:

 find . -type d -path '*/\.*' -prune -o -not -name '.*' -type f -name '*some text*' -print

This is one of the few means of excludes dot-files that also works correctly on BSD, Mac and Linux:

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

• $PWD print the full path to the current directory so that the path does not start with ./
• -name ".*" -prune matches any files or directories that start with a dot and then don't descend
• -o -print means print the file name if the previous expression did not match anything. Using -print or -print0 causes all other expressions to not print by default.

find $DIR -not -path '*/\.*' -type f \( ! -iname ".*" \)

Excludes all hidden directories, and hidden files under $DIR