Bash命令行中的感叹号的含义

Question

I have found this command online, finding and displaying hardlinks to a file eg text.txt.

My question: What is the exclamation mark (!) doing in this command?

find $PWD ! -type d -links +1 -ls | sort -n|cut -d" " -f29 | grep --color=auto "$2"

Answer 1

This negates the next condition. So ! -type d ! -type d means "not a directory".

There is one problem, though: ! is also a special character which is used to make bash do history expansion. That's why you often have to escape ( ... \\! ... ) or quote it ( ... "!" ... ).

See also: The manual for find (try man find or info find ).

• https://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_mono/find.html