find -path Explained

find

The find command provides the option -path. I understand that one has to define where to start looking [commonly known as "path"]. Trying to figure out what it is used for, I found many examples using find -path -prune to exclude some paths.

Question: An explanation what find -path does; what this option is used for.

Please note: It seems crystal clear to me, but then doesn't work as I guessed it would. I worked through the man and the info pages, but I don't get the full meaning of this option.

EDIT As I understand it: find /some/path -name stuff should start looking for "stuff", starting in the directory path which is a subdirectory of some. Works. But then, what does the -path option define?
Definitions including sentences like

do not treat / or . specially

doesn't help much and are even more confusing.

Best Answer

-path does not (re)define the start path. It refers to the combination of the start path and the relative path of the currently examined object.

You may by this e.g. find all files within a subdirectory src no matter on which level.

"do not treat / or . specially" means that * can match both file names including the extension and into subdirectories: [...]/file* would match both /file.txt and /files/foo.bar

Related Solutions

Bash – How to have find recurse into subdirectories when using -prune option

You need to do:

sudo find /var/lib/foo -name '.snapshot' -prune -o -print

it will print whatever is not named ".snapshot", and if ".snapshot" is a directory it will also not descend into it.

why ? because "-prune" is an action (as '-print' is also another action), doing nothing except preventing to go further down in the subdir. And it always return "true", so here, ( -name ... -prune ) is true if and only if the file or dir is named "...", and you you want everything else, hence the -o ( -print ).

Expected behavior of `find -depth` if execute permission denied for subdirectory

Probably the better approach is to handle such directories explicitly. I don't know whether these are standard features but at least with Gnu find this is possible:

find . \( -type d \( \! -executable -or \! -readable \) \) -prune -or -type d

of course, it is also possible to print a message if a directory is ignored:

find . \( -type d \( \! -executable -or \! -readable \) \) \
  -printf "Permission denied: %p\n" -prune -or -type d -print

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – How to have find recurse into subdirectories when using -prune option

Expected behavior of `find -depth` if execute permission denied for subdirectory

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