UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

find / * -print > /var/tmp/updatedfilelist.txt 2>&1


i need to run the above file in cron. problem is, this process takes a long long long time to finish up. and even worse, it fills up the directory the output file is located in.

i dont want the /var directory to ge filled up because of this prcess. so i was thinking about running the program for about 10 minutes then killing it off. after examining the file earlier, i noticed it is the bogus files on the system that makes it take so long. so i concluded thee files that the find command is able to find within the first 10 minutes should be good enough.

will the below command work to kill off that process in 10 minutes?

#!/bin/sh
find / * -print > /var/tmp/updatedfilelist.txt 2>&1
sleep 600
for process in `ps -ef | grep find | awk '{print $2}'`
do
kill -9 $process
done


i'm asking because i'm not sure if the script will wait till the find command is done before initiating the sleep command. because if it has to wait for the find command to finish then this script might as well be useless

why not just limit the number of files you find, instead of time?

Code:

# limit total number
find / * -print | head -10000 > /var/tmp/updatedfilelist.txt 2>&1
# exclude system files
find / * -print ! -group bin ! -group sys ! -group root > /var/tmp/updatedfilelist.txt 2>&1
#exclude files older than a month
find / * -print -mtime -30 > /var/tmp/updatedfilelist.txt 2>&1

What are you trying to acheive by listing every file on the system?

find / *
is silly. "find /" is already going to try for every file. The * is replaced by the shell with a list of files in the current directory. After find finishes with every file due to the /, it will move on to the list of files generated by * and search those too.

so you're saying the * is not needed?

If you're looking specifically for files, add the "-type f" expression which will exclude links, directories, pipes, etc... The "-xdev" expression will prevent the find from tracing through NFS mounts but would require a separate find for each file system, such as /, /usr, /var, etc...

As asked earlier, what exactly are you trying to achieve?

I was trying to make a stronger statement. The presence of the * is harmful.

i was just trying to list all the files on the system and send em to a file. this makes it easier on both the user and system to, at a later date, search for the location of a file from the file that contains the list of all the files on the system. instead of having to use the find command and possibly risking render the system powerless by mistakenly typing the wrong command.