OT: find command permissions: how to exclude dir?

[Gordon Messmer]

Joe Smith wrote:
> Dave Burns wrote:
>> ...
>> Not sure if it is a bug in find or gvfs, but -xdev and -mount do not
>> help with this problem.
> 
> I've never seen these options work, ever. I sure would like to know why, 
> or what I'm doing wrong, it would be handy to be able to use them.

That depends on what you're trying to do with them.  In order to 
determine whether a directory is on the same filesystem, find attempts 
to stat() the directory.  If it doesn't have read permission, it'll spit 
out an error and continue, which is what it's doing in this case.  There 
is no bug.  This is the way that it's supposed to work.

If you do have read permission to the subdirectory, and the subdirectory 
is a different filesystem, then find will not search that directory for 
matching files.  If you've ever seen find return results from a 
directory that it wasn't told to search when using -xdev or -mount, then 
that would be a bug.  I've never seen find misbehave in that way, though.