Is there any way to prevent find from digging down recursively into subdirectories?

Question

When I do:

$ find /

It searches the entire system. How do I prevent that?

(This question comes from an "answer" to another question.)

Answer 1

Use the -prune option.

Answer 2

You might be better off using wildcards. For instance, if you want to find all ksh scripts in the current directory:

$ ls *.ksh

Answer 3

Consider:

-maxdepth n
             True if the depth of the current file into the tree is less than
             or equal to n.

-mindepth n
             True if the depth of the current file into the tree is greater
             than or equal to n.

Answer 4

You may even do

echo /specific/dir/*.jpg

as it's your shell that expands the wildcard. Typing

ls *.jpg

is equivalent to typing

ls foo.jpg bar.jpg

given foo.jpg and bar.jpg are all the files that end with ".jpg" in the current directory.

Answer 5

G'day,

Just wanted to expand on the suggestion from Jon to use -prune. It isn't the easiest of find options to use, for example to just search in the current directory the find command looks like:

find . \( -type d ! -name . -prune \) -o \( <the bit you want to look for> \)

this will stop find from descending into sub-directories within this directory.

Basically, it says, "prune anything that is a directory, whose name isn't ".", i.e. current dir."

The find command evals left to right for each item found in the current directory so after completion of the first element, i.e. the prune segment, it will then continue on with the matched item in your second -o (OR'd) expression.

HTH.

cheers, Rob