On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 21:54 +0000, James Youngman wrote: > On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Mumia W.. > <paduille.4061.mumia.w+nospam@earthlink.net> wrote: > > On 08/13/2008 12:16 AM, Zach Uram wrote: > >> > >> I just installed Debian 4.0 and whenever I use find on / I see: > >> > >> find: WARNING: Hard link count is wrong for ./proc/sys/net: this may <clipped> > > Never use the find command to search /proc; that is a special virtual > > filesystem used to configure your system. If programs touch the wrong things > > in /proc, it could create serious problems for your computer. > > Hmm. Have you ever seen such a problem first-hand, or are you just > propagating a rumour you heard somewhere? I ask since find doesn't > actually touch the filesystem, it just traverses it. Of course if > you specify an action like -delete, then yes, find will touch the > filesystem. > In actual point of fact, for a "real" filesystem, a file or directory has an "access time" (atime) that changes by the simple act of traversing a directory or reading a file. So the file system _does_ change as a result of running 'find'. You can use 'stat --printf='C=%z\nA=%x\nM=%y\n' file' to see the values and how they change, where 'file' is a file or directory name. /proc reports atime/mtime/ctime values when you run 'stat' on one of the objects found in it, but the values don't change as a result of anything a user does. I doubt that a regular user could do anything to the contents of /proc, and it may be that even the root user couldn't, though I'd not be eager to try it. So having 'find' or anything else 'touch' the contents of /proc is certainly safe for all regular users. <clipped> > James. > > -- Bob McGowan
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