[SOLVED] sending find results to a file

I'm trying to do a

find /photos/* -type f -mtime +365

to find all my pictures that are over a year old, but i keep getting argument list too long. How can i view what all the results are, even if it just dumps it to a file that i have to open?

find /photos/* -type f -mtime +365 > myphotos

will send the output of find to file myphotos.

Originally Posted by rjo98 I'm trying to do a find /photos/* -type f -mtime +365 to find all my pictures that are over a year old, but i keep getting argument list too long. How can i view what all the results are, even if it just dumps it to a file that i have to open?

The problem is with the '*'. You not only don't need
it - it causes the problem because bash kindly expands
it for you. So find is (possibly?) fed a list of files
by bash, rather than iterating through a directory tree.

Imagine your "/photos" has 2000 jpgs and 500 subdirectories.

With the * what happens is that you're telling find to start
a search in 2500 locations. Hence the "argument list too long".



Cheers,
Tink

thanks guys

find /photos/* -type f -mtime +365 | less

Enjoy.

oh, i like that too!!!

Originally Posted by Mr. Alex find /photos/* -type f -mtime +365 | less Enjoy.

The "*" is still wrong.

The "*" is still wrong.

Yes, I forgot, you don't need to type "*". The search is always recursive.

I have to admit: I would prefer to pipe ls through grep over using find, like so:

ls /photos | grep "$KEYWORDS"

Of course, it doesn't work for anything other than text searching.

Or even simpler:

$ locate [keyword]

It's kind of quick search.

Originally Posted by Mr. Alex Or even simpler: $ locate [keyword] It's kind of quick search.

Have to say it is much faster than ls | grep. I tries testing it with /usr (keyword "gnome" in Ubuntu) and - what do you know - it took just a few seconds to complete compared with up to a minute with ls | grep.

FYI: locate is a db updated by the OS usually once a day (cron).
Doesn't exist on other *nixes afaik and may not always be up to date if your system has been shutdown for a while....

Originally Posted by chrism01 FYI: locate is a db updated by the OS usually once a day (cron). Doesn't exist on other *nixes afaik and may not always be up to date if your system has been shutdown for a while....

I have located on a few machines and I have never known it to automatically update tho it would be very easy to do. I prefer manually running updatedb because it then doesn't throttle the hard drive while the server maybe dealing with other things.