UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

First and foremost, how dare you step away from your desk when there's unix.com business pending?

I do not present the following in an attempt to sway you away from the grep solution that is already working for you. I'm merely posting it to show another way to work around the unavailability of the -path predicate. It should work on Solaris, although I do not have any experience with that platform (unless you count those 5 minutes, a few years ago, that I spent poking around in an OpenSolaris LiveCD environment):

Code:

find / -type f -name java -print -o \( -name tmp -type d -exec test {} = /tmp \; -prune \)

The use of -name (with the basename of the directory) and -type predicates is not strictly necessary; they do not in any way affect the output of the command. They are there only as a performance optimization, preventing -exec from forking when the test cannot possibly succeed (-name) or when the test is not necessary (-type).

At this point, the readability gap between the all find approach and the grep pipeline has widened. However, in situations where very large subtrees are to be excluded and where resources may be at a premium, an advantage of the find solution's -prune is that it avoids visiting very many files that are of no interest. With the grep solution, find has to visit all the unwanted files and directories since it is grep that will determine what to include. However, in your case, this may not be an issue at all.

Regards,
Alister