UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

You are redirecting the output into the 'example' file so wouldn't see anything appearing on your terminal.

'find /' explores every single folder and filesystem in your system, bar none, so of course could take a while. If you want to restrict where it looks, pick a more specific folder, or use options like -xdev to prevent it crossing between different filesystems.

As I'm running it, I'm doing a 'tail' to observe the output. Maybe I'm not being patient enough. I'm going to retry it using the "quotes" like you suggested.

---------- Post updated at 08:45 AM ---------- Previous update was at 08:43 AM ----------

Any way to observe the overall output as it is running? Meaning, can I see the paths it is taking which it's searching them? Maybe it's hanging on a directory.

---------- Post updated at 09:56 AM ---------- Previous update was at 08:45 AM ----------

UPDATE: I tried

Code:

find / -type d -name "*2011"

and it is now showing output. I guess strd output to '>' doesn't apply to find. Now its acutally show TOO MUCH output. Now I'm trying this to norrow it down and it's not working

Code:

find / -type d -name "*2011" | grep -v "DS."

No ouput again........

'tail' by itself will just sit there, waiting for you to type at least 10 lines into the keyboard.

Try tail -f filename

> works perfectly fine with find. I think your method of viewing the output was suspect. Try escaping that dot.m 'DS\.' Put it in single quotes, not double, so the shell doesn't get all happy and eat the backslash for you. grep takes regular expressions, and in those, "." means "any character". So "DS." would match DSA, DSB, DSC, DSD, and so forth. To match DS. and only DS. you have to escape the . to make it realize it's a real .

If that's not the problem, then what exactly are you trying to do?

Thank you for the response. Yes, I'm aware of the 'tail' syntax. I just mentioned it in a general context.

The grep 'DS.' is correct as I don't want anything (-v) matching DSA, DSB,DSC, etc.

I'm still puzzled that '>' just simply refuses to write to 'filename'. I'm perplexed with this weird behavior

How about you tell us exactly what you're doing then, word for word, letter for letter, keystroke for keystroke? "general context" may not be enough. We need to see exactly what you're doing to tell if anything's wrong.

'find' just writes to stdout like any other command. I don't suppose your disk's full or anything like that.

First I ran

Code:

find / -type d -name "*2011" > ok

as this was running I did a

Code:

tail -f ok

Nothing is showing during the

Code:

tail -f ok

Eventually I halted the process. Then I ran this yesterday

Code:

find / -type d -name "*2011"

when I came into work this morning, it was still running. Looks like it is getting hung up somewhere during the search.

We have reached post #14 and we know nothing about your system.
What Operating System and version do you have?
Is the system sick or (as another poster suggested) out of disc space?

This should produce results on most systems (and not search NFS filesystems). Some versions of "find" don't give output unless you specify "-print" or "-exec ..".

Code:

find // -local -type d -name \*"2011" -exec ls -lad {} \;