This command is slow: find / -name 'program.c' 2>/dev/null
1) Any faster alternatives?
2) Is there an alternative to the above command to search for a file within a specific nested directory (but not the entire system)?
The first / in your command is the base directory from which find will begin searching. You can specify any directory you like, so if you know, for example, that program.c is somewhere in your home directory you could do find ~ -name 'program.c' or if it's in, say, /usr/src do find /usr/src -name 'program.c'
That should help with both 1 and 2.
If you want a command that's not find that can be faster you can check out the mlocate stuff. If you've done a recent updatedb (or had cron do it for you overnight) you can do locate <pattern> and it will show you everywhere that matches that pattern in a file/directory name, and that's usually quite fast.
For fast searching, you probably want locate
It is usually setup to do a daily scan of the filesystem, and index the files.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/locate
although locate & updatedb is for the whole system, the search usually is faster.
Related
I need to search for a particular file name "i2need.txt" in all directories.
I tried this:
find * -type f
But I am getting all the files present in the directories.
I need only the i2need.txt file. Can anyone please help me in this.
If I'm understanding this question correctly you should just be able to start the search at the root directory /:
find / -name <filename>
Of course you'll likely get a lot of permission-related errors but the files' paths you have access to should be on stdout.
You can also filter out the errors with 2> /dev/null (redirecting it to /dev/null, effectively dropping it).
Alternately
locate i2need.txt
You might need to do this first
sudo updatedb
Presently i am using linux(Fedora 15) and i ma trying to search a folder in the entire file system like with below command
find / -name "apache-tomcat*"
The execution of the above command is taking more and more time that a user cant wait and results are some thing like below
[root#user fedrik]# find / -name "apache-tomcat*"
find: `/proc/6236/task/6236/ns/net': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6236/task/6236/ns/uts': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6236/task/6236/ns/ipc': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6236/ns/net': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6236/ns/uts': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6236/ns/ipc': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6462/task/6462/ns/net': No such file or directory
.................
.................
But as i have mentioned it is taking long time to process and sometimes it is been strucked, so can anyone please let me know on how to search a particular folder by name with a command from linux terminal that will be very fast and should search in the entire file system like above i used '/'
Edit
Actually my intention is to search the folder something like apache-tomcat-7.0.37 in the entire filesystem,
for example there may be many folders like apache-tomcat-6.0.45, apache-tomcat-5.1.7, apache-tomcat-5.0.37........... on different locations on filesystem
So as we can observe only the last part(which is numerical part) is changing and the entire folder name is same, so is there a way to search for these kind of folders irrespective of the last numerical part , like by using regular expression or somethingl ike that.
Finally my intention is to find the folders of the format apache-tomcat-xxxxxxx on the entire file system, because if we search for just apache-tomcat we will get hundreds of results and even thousands too sometimes which is difficult to analyze and search from them
?
Try this:
locate apache-tomcat
It uses a database (updated by the hilariously-named updatedb, which you can run with sudo updatedb to refresh the search index).
locate apache-tomcat | grep -E '^apache-tomcat-[[:digit:]]+\.[[:digit:]]+\.[[:digit:]]+$'
or just use [0-9] instead of [[:digit:]]. That's probably more readable. Or
locate apache-tomcat | perl -ne 'print if /^apache-tomcat-\d+\.\d+\.\d+$/'
Whatever you do, you definitely want to use locate instead of find, as it will be much faster.
I primarily program in Linux, using tcsh shell. By default, my current directory is the root of my code base - I use "find" to locate whichever file I'm interested in modifying, and then once find shows up the location of the file, I can then edit/modify on Vim.
The problem is, due to the size of the code base, every time I ask find to show up the location of a file , it takes at least 4-5 seconds to complete the search, which are too short to be used for anything else !! So, since the rate is new files being added to the code base is very small, i'm looking for a way as follows:
1) Generate the list of all files in my code base
2) Have find look in only those locations/files to answer my query
I've seen how opening up files in cscope is lightning fast, as it stores the list of files previously. I'd like to use the same mechanism for find, just not from within the cscope window, but from the generic cmd line.
Any ideas ?
Install the locate, mlocate, or slocate package from your distribution, and either wait for cron to run the update task :) or run the updatedb command manually via the /etc/cron.daily/mlocate or similar file.
$ time locate kernel.txt
/home/sarnold/Local/linux-2.6/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
/home/sarnold/Local/linux-2.6-config-all/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
/home/sarnold/Local/linux-apparmor/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
/usr/share/doc/libfuse2/kernel.txt.gz
real 0m0.595s
Yes. See slocate (or updatedb & locate).
The -U flag is particularily interesting because you can just index the directory that contains your code (and thus, updating or creating the database will be quick).
You could write a list of directories to a file and use them in your find command:
$ find /path/to/src -type d > dirs
$ find $(cat dirs) -type f -name "foo"
Alternatively, write a list of files to a file and use grep on it. The list of files is more likely to change than the list of dirs though.
$ find /path/to/src -type f > files
$ vi $(grep foo files)
find in conjunction with xargs (substituting -exec) does differ significantly in execution timings:
http://forrestrunning.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/find-exec-xargs/
I'm trying to write a shell script under linux, which lists all folders (recursively) with a certain name and no symlink pointing to it.
For example, I have:
/home/htdocs/cust1/typo3_src-4.2.11
/home/htdocs/cust2/typo3_src-4.2.12
/home/htdocs/cust3/typo3_src-4.2.12
Now I want to go through all subdirectories of /home/htdocs and find those folders typo3_*, that are not pointed to from somewhere.
Should be possible with a shellscript or a command, but I have no idea how.
Thanks for you help
Stefan
I think none of the common file systems store if there are symlinks pointing to this file in the file node, so you would have to scan all other files to see if it is a symlink to this one. If you don't limit your depth of search to a certain level, this might take a very long time. If you want to perform that search in /home/htdocs, for example, it would work something like this:
# find specified folders:
find /home/htdocs -name 'typo3_*' -type d | while read folder; do
# list all symlinks pointing to $folder
find -L /home/htdocs -samefile "$folder"|grep -v "$folder\$"
done
I have a folder on my server to which I had a number of symbolic links pointing. I've since created a new folder and I want to change all those symbolic links to point to the new folder. I'd considered replacing the original folder with a symlink to the new folder, but it seems that if I continued with that practice it could get very messy very fast.
What I've been doing is manually changing the symlinks to point to the new folder, but I may have missed a couple.
Is there a way to check if there are any symlinks pointing to a particular folder?
I'd use the find command.
find . -lname /particular/folder
That will recursively search the current directory for symlinks to /particular/folder. Note that it will only find absolute symlinks. A similar command can be used to search for all symlinks pointing at objects called "folder":
find . -lname '*folder'
From there you would need to weed out any false positives.
You can audit symlinks with the symlinks program written by Mark Lord -- it will scan an entire filesystem, normalize symlink paths to absolute form and print them to stdout.
There isn't really any direct way to check for such symlinks. Consider that you might have a filesystem that isn't mounted all the time (eg. an external USB drive), which could contain symlinks to another volume on the system.
You could do something with:
for a in `find / -type l`; do echo "$a -> `readlink $a`"; done | grep destfolder
I note that FreeBSD's find does not support the -lname option, which is why I ended up with the above.
find . -type l -printf '%p -> %l\n'
Apart from looking at all other folders if there are links pointing to the original folder, I don't think it is possible. If it is, I would be interested.
find / -lname 'fullyqualifiedpathoffile'
find /foldername -type l -exec ls -lad {} \;
For hardlinks, you can get the inode of your directory with one of the "ls" options (-i, I think).
Then a find with -inum will locate all common hardlinks.
For softlinks, you may have to do an ls -l on all files looking for the text after "->" and normalizing it to make sure it's an absolute path.
To any programmers looking here (cmdline tool questions probably should instead go to unix.stackexchange.com nowadays):
You should know that the Linux/BSD function fts_open() gives you an easy-to-use iterator for traversing all sub directory contents while also detecting such symlink recursions.
Most command line tools use this function to handle this case for them. Those that don't often have trouble with symlink recursions because doing this "by hand" is difficult (any anyone being aware of it should just use the above function instead).