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When I used the find command, I almost always need to search the local drives. But, I almost always have super large network shares mounted and these are included in the search. Is there an easy way to exclude those in the find command, grep and other similar commands? Example:
find / -name .vimrc
If you're using GNU find (as is used on most Linux systems), you'll want to use -mount:
find / -mount -name .vimrc
OS X/MacOS provides the local pseudo-fstype. This not in GNU find (fstypes recognized by GNU find).
Use the -fstype local option to find on MacOS:
find / -fstype local -name .vimrc
If you want to exclude only specific paths, you could use -prune:
find / -path "/path/to/ignore" -prune -o -name .vimrc
Update: MacOS Catalina (Jan 2022)
I'm two major releases behind the latest MacOS, but some has changed.
First, MacOS now supports the -mount option. The man page for find says "The same thing as -xdev, for GNU find compatibility."
Second, -fstype local still seems to work. The man page Indiates that it "matches any file system physically mounted on the system where the find is being executed".
I did a test with two drives mounted in /Volumes, one a USB flash drive (which I think counts as physically mounted) and the other a network drive. I ran find /Volumes <option> -name '*txt'. Running with -mount returned no results immediately since there were no such files on the current filesystem. Running with -fstype local found a .txt file on the USB drive very quickly and then seemed to traverse the full mounted drive without returning any files (even though some do exist).
find pipe to grep as shown in this answer: superuser.com/questions/80033/… . Lately, I've been using ack (betterthangrep.com) instead, but ack doesn't seem to have an option to search only local drives.
Jan 5, 2011 at 15:43
-prune to it or it will still traverse the undesired file systems. The second example I believe was meant to be -path instead of -name so it will ignore the path. FWIW... the last example does work, it stays on the "current filesystem" so doesn't traverse others.
Apr 16, 2019 at 17:48
find man page and submit an edit, I'd appreciate it.
Oct 13, 2020 at 14:37
man find shows:
-xdevDon't descend directories on other filesystems.
Original question was to find on local disk only, so for the sake of completeness, here's what I used;
for PART in `awk '(!/^#/ && $6 != "0" || $3 == "xfs" ) { print $2 }' /etc/fstab 2>/dev/null`; do find $PART -xdev -name .vimrc -print 2>/dev/null; done
As long as your fstab is set up properly it should only search the local disks; ie, cifs mounts should have that final flag set to 0. I included the OR for xfs filesystems when we started going to RHEL7, they should be set to 0 also as they aren't meant to do the disk reorg after so many restarts.
Hope that helps.
