find directories not containing a file

Question

How can I use the find command to locate directories that do NOT contain a particular file? E.g., if I have bunch of directories that should be under revision control, can I search and find the ones that do not have a .git sub-directory? Or, my project specifies that all modules should have a utilities.py file; how do I search to find which sub-directories do not yet have the required file?

Answer 1

The solution that might work for your case is,

find . -type d '!' -exec test -e "{}/utilities.py" ';' -print

Testing

1. I created 4 sub directories named dir1, dir2, dir3 and dir with spaces. I wanted to test if this handles spaces equally well which is why I created a directory with spaces in its name.
2. I created files file1, file2, file3 and file4 in dir2 and dir3.
3. In dir1, I created file1, file2, file3.
4. In dir with spaces, I created a file named file with spaces.

5. Now, I execute my find command as,

   find . -type d '!' -exec test -e "{}/file with spaces" ';' -print
   

6. The output I get is,

   .
   ./dir1
   ./dir2
   ./dir3
   

7. As expected, since the directory dir with spaces contains the file named file with spaces it is not listed in the output. If I change the find command to have file4 in it, the output I get is,

   .
   ./dir with spaces
   ./dir1
   

EDIT

However, the above approach doesn't seem to work if we have nested subdirectories and the file in the final level. So to overcome such scenarios, you could modify your find to something like discussed over here.

find . -type f -not -name 'utilities.py' -exec dirname {} \; | sort -u

As Gilles suggests in his comments,

For .git, it would be more useful to skip directories that have a parent containing .git. You can do this by adding a -prune in the right place:

find . -type d -exec test -e "{}/.git" ';' -prune -o -print