How to restrict the "find" command to a physical drive?

Question

Often I go looking for something and resort to running find / -name ... But when there are multiple network drives mounted it can take forever.

There doesn't appear to be any parameter to restrict it to a physical disc/volume. Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

You can instruct find to never cross a filesystem boundary. From man find:

-xdev  Don't descend directories on other filesystems.

However, this does not distinguish between filesystems on the network and on local physical drives.

Note that this means:

• find / -xdev ... will not, for example, go into /proc
• but find /* -xdev will.

This is because the "other filesystems" check is done with respect to the paths that were given as arguments.