Remove certain types of files except in a folder

Question

I have a command in my makefile for clean:

rm -rf */*.o */*.cmo */*.cmi */*.cmx */*.cma */*.cmxa */*.annot

Now I would like to write a cleanpartial that removes these files except those in the folder frontend/ and the folder frontend/gen/.

Does anyone know how to write this command properly?

Do you mean that matching files *directly* within `frontend` should be left alone, but matching files in e.g. `frontend/somedir` should be deleted? What about matching files in `frontend/gen/somedir`? (The [answer I gave](http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/275034/135943) simply skips everything within `frontend` and all of its subdirectories, that being the simplest interpretation.) — Wildcard, Apr 08 '16 at 00:30
The above is a more specific case of http://unix.stackexchange.com/q/87258/135943 as it involves pattern matching as well as excluding a directory; not quite a duplicate but closely related. — Wildcard, Apr 08 '16 at 01:33

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 08 '16 at 00:27

You should use find for this.

You can safely test with the following command:

find . \( -name frontend -prune \) -o -type f \( -name \*.o -o -name '*.cm[oixa]' -o -name \*.cmxa -o -name \*.annot \) -print

Once you're happy with the list of files that gets printed, run the real command to delete the lot of them:

find . \( -name frontend -prune \) -o -type f \( -name \*.o -o -name '*.cm[oixa]' -o -name \*.cmxa -o -name \*.annot \) -exec rm -f {} +

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