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John Mee
Asked: 2018-05-23 18:01:40 +0800 CST

How to restrict the "find" command to a physical drive?

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Often I go looking for something and resort to running find / -name ... But when there are multiple network drives mounted it can take forever.

There doesn't appear to be any parameter to restrict it to a physical disc/volume. Is there any way to do this?

find

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can instruct find to never cross a filesystem boundary. From man find:

    -xdev  Don't descend directories on other filesystems.

    However, this does not distinguish between filesystems on the network and on local physical drives.

    Note that this means:

    • find / -xdev ... will not, for example, go into /proc
    • but find /* -xdev will.

    This is because the "other filesystems" check is done with respect to the paths that were given as arguments.

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