[Fedora] FC4 'find' command is finding wrong hard link count

Robert Nichols rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net
Fri Jun 17 03:48:19 UTC 2005


Tom Broadhurst wrote:

> I understand this is not a critical problem - yet, and I understand the
> principal behind /proc but, this hasn't happened to me in more than 10 years
> using Redhat/Fedora.
> So something has either changed or something's broken.
> I routinely use "find / -name ......", so how do I eliminate /proc from the
> search path?
> The suggested -noleaf option pertains to the 2 hard links "." and ".." in
> every directory, including /proc. A 'ls -al' of /proc shows them clearly.
> A simple "If it don't work right, don't use it" (my words, not yours), is
> not an acceptable answer, unless it comes from the filesystem or find
> command developers.

The problem with the link count in /proc is that it changes every time a
process is created or terminates, so the number of directories that
'find' sees during processing might not agree with the link count that
it read at the start.  I admit that doesn't seem terribly likely unless
the system is quite busy, but it can certainly happen.

I almost always use the "-xdev" option to prevent 'find' from descending
into file systems other than the ones I explcitly specified, e.g.,

     find -xdev / /usr /var ...

It's pretty rare that I actually want to search my entire system, which
would include a news spool, a seldom used MS-Windows file system,
possibly a mounted CD or DVD, ..., and of course /proc.

--
Bob Nichols         Yes, "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.




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