How to do Find Command Invert Match in Solaris

Question: I’m using Sun Solaris OS. When I execute the find command, I get “find: bad option -not” as shown below. How do I fix the following error?

find: bad option -not
find: path-list predicate-list" in Solaris SunOS.

Answer: In Linux, find command with -not option is used for inverting the match.

For example:

$ find . -not -name '*.txt'
./509edca2-8636-7542-1845-cafd3cab4c39_header.xml
./68d32b32-8638-7542-0e45-8c374f03f56b_header.xml
./mondbfile.sql

This command finds all the files and directories which doesnot have .txt at the filename. For more examples, refer our earlier article Mommy, I found it! — 15 Practical Linux Find Command Examples

Now, execution of the above command in Solaris will fail with the “bad option -not” message.

$ find . -not -name '*.txt'
find: bad option -not
find: path-list predicate-list

On Solaris, use ! operator to perform inverse matching as shown below.

$ find . ! -name '*.txt'
./509edca2-8636-7542-1845-cafd3cab4c39_header.xml
./68d32b32-8638-7542-0e45-8c374f03f56b_header.xml
./mondbfile.sql

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