Help with decoding the 'find' command syntax

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi folks,

I just want to understand what this find command does. The syntax "- - -" is cumbersome and unusual. Please let me know what it is for?

find - - - share/ ../share/ -type f  ! -path '*/CVS*'
2

Please let us know what Operating System and version you have.
There is much variation in the find command, but I've never seen this one.

3

It could be a folder literally named - , which find is being instructed to iterate through three times.

Naming a folder - is of course cumbersome and unusual, still, but CVS is known to make oddly-named folders sometimes.

$ mkdir ./-
$ touch ./-/asdf
$ find - - -
-
-/asdf
-
-/asdf
-
-/asdf

$
4

It might be an obfuscated way of waking up a dodgy NFS automount? Is the filesystem containing the files an automounted NFS partition? Is this Solaris I wonder?

5

It is Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client release 5.4 (Tikanga) and yes, it is NFS mounted.

---------- Post updated at 10:25 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:16 AM ----------

Thanks Corona688. But this seems to be not working, I am getting find: invalid predicate `-' error.

Also, what does this syntax say??

share/ ../share/
6

that's two folders, one in the current directory, and one in a directory one up.

7

... and the free-standing hyhens are also being treated as directories, whether or not they actually exist.
There has to be a better way of doing this which does not give error messages every time.
Not using the NFS automounter is one.

8

In what way does it do so?

9

It issues three pointless searches of a directory called "-" to ensure that the automounter gets the NFS mount ready. The grep gets rid of any extraneous output. I don't endorse the technique because I would prefer a technique which executes some free-standing commands on the NFS mounted drive and ignores the output, followed by executing the real command and checking whether it worked. Because the find syntax is invalid on most O/S it's hard to check the code.
This would be easier to diagnose if we knew the Operating System and version of the NFS server and some detail of the network (assuming that this is not a test rig with Virtual Machines.