Linux find command - show progress

Solution 1:

with this trick you can see the current folder - but no progress bar - sorry.

 watch readlink -f /proc/$(pidof find)/cwd

Solution 2:

A little utility called pv (pipe viewer) may help. From the fantastic summary by Peteris Krumins:

Pipe viewer is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline.

You can use pv in a number of ways. When playing around here, I put it immediately after a pipe to monitor progress of the output generated by find (should pass stdin to stdout untouched)

find / -mtime -1h | pv > /dev/null

which will show output a bit like this:

6.42MB 0:01:25 [31.7kB/s] [         <=>      ]

(I redirected stdout to /dev/null so I could see the progress bar in action without output flying by. This is likely not your intent with find, so tailor accordingly)

I'm honestly not sure how well this works in the wild. For "expensive" finds like the one above (traversing from root), it appeared to work fairly well. For simpler commands in a deeper node in the directory tree, pv failed miserably. These commands are returning results immediately, so a progress bar is probably moot here.

At any rate, play around and see if this works at all for what you need. Food for thought, at least.

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Solution 3:

I searched for this today and got here via Google. I had a long-running find running on OS X and apparently, watch doesn't exist there. So here's another solution:

lsof -Fn -a -c find -d cwd +r 10

• lsof = list of open files
• -Fn = just show the name of the file/directory (prefixed with 'n' character, skip this if you prefer the full lsof output
• -a = tell lsof to show only lines matching all criteria (by default it shows lines matching any criteria)
• -c find = show files/directories opened by process named find (actually, process whose name starts with find, but it's case-sensitive so Finder won't show up)
• -d cwd = show lines with FD (filedescriptor) cwd (current working directory)
• +r 10 = show output every 10 seconds until no open files are found (find is finished)

This will show the directory find is processing every 10 seconds, so it should give an idea if find is still working and how far it has progressed.

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Solution 4:

There's an example of parallel searches with find in man find. Using it, you can perform multiple checks for every item, performing multiple actions depending on which condition works. The first check may be, for example, simple-print, so all names are printed to stdout. The second check will do what you want. Something like:

find /work \( -fprint /dev/stderr \) , \( -name 'core' -exec rm {} \; \)

If the second check should display filenames, too, you can redirect one of them to stderr using -fprint /dev/stderr.

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Solution 5:

AFAIK, it doesn't, and implementing it would be nontrivial.

... Hmm. Perhaps a script running find <target dir> -type d first, storing the list and then echoing each dir before running a find <list item> -maxdepth 1 <rest of find parameters> in a for loop.

Note that you're trading a /significant/ loss of performance in exchange for being able to vaguely see what it's doing.