Linux find command - show progress

Question

I was wondering if there's any way to display some kind of progress info when searching for files in linux using find. I often find myself searching for files on a big disk and some kind of progress indicator would be very helpfull, like a bar or at least the current directory "find" searches in. Are there any scripts that do that, or does find support some hooks?

Answer 1

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

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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

(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.