A regularly executing "find" command without my intention freaks me

simber · 05-21-2006, 08:02 AM

Hello everyone,
There is a find command running on some regular intervals without my intention, and I want to understand what it does. It has may regex in it and I am a bit alien to those regex stuff, so can someone please translate it to me (especially this $^/mnt$$\|$^/cdrom$$.... part)? and how come there is some parenthesis after directory to be searched? Anyway, here's the output of the command via

Code:

 ps -aux | grep 'find'

: Thanks in advance!

Code:

/usr/bin/find / ( -fstype nfs -o -fstype NFS -o -fstype proc -o -fstype afs -o -fstype proc -o -fstype smbfs -o -fstype autofs -o -fstype iso9660 -o -fstype ncpfs -o -fstype coda -o -fstype devpts -o -fstype ftpfs -o -fstype devfs -o -fstype mfs -o -fstype sysfs -o -fstype shfs -o -type d -regex \(^/mnt$\)\|\(^/cdrom$\)\|\(^/tmp$\)\|\(^/usr/tmp$\)\|\(^/var/tmp$\)\|\(^/var/spool$\)\|\(^/proc$\)\|\(^/media$\) ) -prune -o -print0

rjwilmsi · 05-21-2006, 10:04 AM

^ means 'not'
$ means at the end of end of a line
| means or
Brackets make an expression rather than a list of separate characters, so here brakcets makes /tmp an expression and not / and t and m and p.
The backslashes \ seem to be the syntax for this particular command (?)

It looks like this regex is excluding a list of directories from being searched.

spirit receiver · 05-21-2006, 10:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rjwilmsi

^ means 'not'

To my knowledge it represents the beginning of a line unless contained in square brackets. So the regular expression tells find which directories to examine.

The parentheses are just logical grouping. I guess that this command is issued by one of the scripts in /etc/cron.daily, but I couldn't find it in SUSE 10.1. If that's the case, moving the script to /etc/cron.weekly probably won't do much harm, so that it won't be executed that often at least.