17.25 Keeping find From Searching Networked Filesystems

The most painful aspect of a large NFS ( 1.33 ) environment is avoiding the access of files on NFS servers that are down. find is particularly sensitive to this, because it is very easy to access dozens of machines with a single command. If find tries to explore a file server that happens to be down, it will time out. It is important to understand how to prevent find from going too far.

To do this, use -prune with -fstype or -xdev . [Unfortunately, not all find s have all of these. -JP  ] fstype tests for filesystem types, and expects an argument like nfs or 4.2 . The latter refers to the "fast filesystem" introduced in the 4.2 release of the Berkeley Software Distribution. To limit find to files only on a local disk or disks, use the clause -fstype 4.2 -prune or -o -fstype  nfs -prune .

To limit the search to one particular disk partition, use -xdev . For example, if you need to clear out a congested disk partition, you could look for all files greater than 40 blocks on the current disk partition with this command:

% 

find . -size +40 -xdev -print