For some reason I had a hell of a time finding a way of excluding a directory from the ‘find’ command. I finally found a solution that works thanks to this website.

The solution for me was to add the following to my find command:

! -path "<directory to exclude>"

So to find all files modified less than 24 hours ago on my grandmother-in-law’s computer, I used the following command:

find . -mtime -1 ! -path "./AppData/*"

Grandma’s computer runs Windows 7 but I’ve configured Cygwin and ssh so I can use the tools I’m fimilar with. The above command excludes appdata and searches her user profile for all files modified today.