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Currently I'm repeatedly doing a 'find' that's too slow. I'm searching for non-hidden executable files within "$root", excluding "$root/bin":

find "$root" -type f -perm -o+x -not -path "$root/bin/*" \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \)

I'd like to restrict find to only look in directories with mtimes older than a certain time. I still want it to recurse into old directories' subdirectories, but I don't want it to check the regular files inside unless the directory passes my mtime check. Is it possible to do this with GNU find or do I need two invocations, one to find the directories and another to check the files inside?

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    I don't think that will make things faster. It's the stat that makes things slow. And to recurse into subdirectories, it'll have to stat each file to see whether it's a directory or not. Or is it OK to prune the whole directory tree if one of its ancestors is too new?
    – Mikel
    Aug 16, 2012 at 22:13

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Try this one:

find "$root" -type d -mtime -1 ! -path "$root/bin*" -exec find "{}" -maxdepth 1 -type f -executable  \;

It's not just one find run, however maxdepth should accelerate the result.

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  • For clarity I ended up doing two finds with a loop, but I used the maxdepth trick on the inner find so they're functionally the same. Thanks :)
    – Joseph Garvin
    Aug 17, 2012 at 15:37

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