Warning: find can overwhelm the system

Last revision July 20, 2004

Never try to do a find command on the entire file system at once on pangea. That is, never try a command of the form:

find / ...

Such a find command will unnecessary consume large amounts of computer time and generate a lot of network traffic.

Pangea and many other computers in the School use network file programs like NFS or AFS to access the disks of other computers as if they were locally attached. The disks of remote computers are "mounted" on local directory names. A find command starting at / will look not only at all files on the local disks, but also all files on the remote disks, generating large amounts of network traffic talking to/from those remote computers.

On pangea this is especially bad, because the AFS world-wide distributed file system (mounted at /afs) gives us access to files at hundreds of other computer sites around the world. This is probably hundreds of terabytes of data to look through.

Check the pangea find policy web page for the correct way to search the entire local file system on pangea with find.

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