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2.12 Filesystems

A filesystem is a section of a disk, either on the local host or mounted from a remote host over a network. Searching network filesystems can be slow, so it is common to make find avoid them.

There are two ways to avoid searching certain filesystems. One way is to tell find to only search one filesystem:

Option: -xdev ¶

Option: -mount ¶

Don’t descend directories on other filesystems. These options are synonyms.

The other way is to check the type of filesystem each file is on, and not descend directories that are on undesirable filesystem types:

Test: -fstype type ¶

True if the file is on a filesystem of type type. The valid filesystem types vary among different versions of Unix; an incomplete list of filesystem types that are accepted on some version of Unix or another is:

autofs ext3 ext4 fuse.sshfs nfs proc sshfs sysfs ufs tmpfs xfs

You can use ‘-printf’ with the ‘%F’ directive to see the types of your filesystems. The ‘%D’ directive shows the device number. See Print File Information. ‘-fstype’ is usually used with ‘-prune’ to avoid searching remote filesystems (see Directories).