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I have a very specific need to find unowned files and directories in Solaris using a script, and need to be able to exclude full directory paths from the find because they contain potentially thousands of unowned files (and it's normal because they are files hosted on other servers). I don't even want find to search in those directories as it will hang the server (cpu spiking to 99% for a long time), therefore piping the find results in egrep to filter out those directories is not an option.

I know I can do this to exclude one of more directories by name:

find / -mount -local \( -type d -a \( -name dir1 -o -name dir2 -o dir3 \) \) -prune -o \( -nouser -o -nogroup \) -print

However, this will match dir1 and dir2 anywhere in the directory structure of any directories, which is not what I want at all.

I want to be able to prevent find from even searching in the following directories (as an example):

/opt/dir1
/opt/dir2
/var/dir3/dir4

And I still want it to find unowned files and directories in the following directories:

/opt/somedir/dir1
/var/dir2
/home/user1/dir1

I have tried using regex in the -name arguments, but since find only matches 'name' against the basename of what it finds, I can't specify a path. Unfortunately, Solaris's find does not support GNU find options such as -wholename or -path, so I'm kind of screwed.

My goal would be to have a script with the following syntax:

script.sh "/path/to/dir1,/path/to/dir2,/path/to/dir3"

How could I do that using find and standard sh scripting (/bin/sh) on Solaris (5.8 and up)?

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    starting find from '/' is problematic. A pre-processing step in your script that grabs just the top level path elements, ie. /opt, /var, and then runs find just for those dirs, after excluding the dirs you're not interested in??? Just an idea, good luck! If you come up with your own solution, please post, as this is an interesting problem. You might also get more eyes on this if you post at unix.stackexchange.com Commented Oct 22, 2011 at 3:17
  • Starting from / is actually required. The purpose of this script is to produce audit compliance results listing all unowned files and dirs in servers we support for our clients, without knowing where they could be. We know for sure there are some directories we never want to scan (/proc, /dev, remote mounts, etc...), but we always need to scan everything else. We gave lots of thought about using an inclusion list instead of exclusion list, and we had no choice but to go with the exclusion option cause it's the one that covered the most unknown cases (still following me?). Commented Oct 22, 2011 at 5:47
  • Just duplicated the post on unix.stackexchange.com as suggested: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/23077/… Commented Oct 22, 2011 at 5:58
  • Potential answer posted by rozcietrzewiacz on unix.stackexchange.com: "Since the implementation(s) of find do not support -path test, you can simulate it using -exec test "{}" = "/path/to/exclude" \; -prune. The {} should be expanded to full path name.". I tested the solution and it works, although it takes a little bit more processing power. I'm worried about the added processing time and the increased CPU usage if I should run this against a file server for example... I'm considering the answer anyway. What do you think about this? Commented Oct 22, 2011 at 14:47

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You can't match files by full path with Solaris find, but you can match files by inode. So use ls -i to generate a list of inodes to prune, then call find. This assumes that there aren't so many directories you want to prune that you'd go over the command line length limit.

inode_matches=$(ls -bdi /opt/dir1 /opt/dir2 /var/dir3/dir4 |
                sed -e 's/ *\([0-9][0-9]*\) .*/-inum \1 -o/')
find / -xdev \( $inode_matches -nouser -o -nogroup \) -prune -o -print

An alternative approach would be to use a Perl or Python script and roll your own directory traversal. Perl ships with a find2perl script that can get you started with the File::Find module. In Python, see the walk function in the os.path module.

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6 Comments

Going to test it out and let you know how it works. Don't worry, if this works well, I will accept the answer gladly!
Works very well! However I replaced the sed by awk for my purpose: exclude_dirs_inums=ls -bdi $exclude_dirs 2> /dev/null | awk '{print $1}' | tr '\n' ',' | sed -e 's/,$//' | sed -e 's/,/ -o -inum /g'` and then the variable I fill with the expression is f_exclude_dirs="( -inum $exclude_dirs_inums ) -prune -o". (Sorry for the formatting, but there's too many backticks in my code...)
@YanickGirouard Tip: use $(…). Not only is it easier to reconcile with markdown, but it'll also save you from headaches when you have quotes insite the substituted command. You seem to go through a lot of hurdles just to avoid the last -o. It would be a lot simpler to add -e '$s/-o//' to the parameters of sed.
Thanks Gilles. I'm well aware of this in fact. I can't recall where and when, but I once had trouble using $() with /bin/sh on some old systems. It just wouldn't parse as the version of sh was too old (probably a Solaris 5.8 actually. I do prefer $() too when I can however, and usually use bash, but this script has to be portable on hundreds of systems and some are several years old. I gotta go with what I know will work everywhere without exception.
Sorry Gilles, I missed the last part of your comment the first time. What exactly will -e '$s/-o//' do? Not familiar with this form. Trims the last one? Didn't know you could use match characters in front of s like that?
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