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Pruning some things out with (GNU) find options

Suppose that you need to scan your filesystems and pass some files with specific names, ownerships, or whatever, except that you want to exclude scanning under /tmp and /var/tmp (as illustrative examples). Perhaps also you're feeding the file names to a shell script, especially in a pipeline, which means that you'd like to screen out directory and file names that have (common) problem characters in them, like spaces.

Because we want to use a character class to match whitespace, we need to use one of the regular expression types that include this, so: Unfortunately it's sometimes what we turn to because our other options involve things like writing programs that consume and filter NUL-terminated file paths. PS: One of the little annoyances of Unix for system administrators is that so many things in a stock Unix environment fall apart the moment people start putting odd characters in file names, unless you take extreme care and use unusual tools.

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