breadth-first option in the Linux `find' utility?

Question

Is there any breadth-first/depth-first option in the Linux `find' utility?

Answer 1

There's nothing built-in to find, even GNU find. You can postprocess the output of find to sort by number of slashes, for example with Perl:

find ... | perl -e 'print sort {$a=~s!/!/! <=> $b=~s!/!/!} <>'

• <> is the list of all input lines;
• $a =~ s!/!/!g is the number of slashes in $a, which we use as the sort criterion.

If you can use zsh:

echo **/*(oe\''REPLY=${REPLY//[^\/]}'\')

• **/* lists all files in the current directory and subdirectories.
• The stuff inside the parentheses is a glob qualifier.
• The glob qualifier oe controls the order in which matches are returned: they are sorted by the value of REPLY after running the code here in quotes for each match with REPLY initially set to the matched path.
• Said code transforms $REPLY to delete everything except slashes. So the result consists of everything at depth 1 (empty resulting $REPLY), then everything at depth 2 ($REPLY ends up to be /), depth 3 (//), etc.

Answer 2

Nope

Go to this question on SO for workarounds.