OT: find command permissions: how to exclude dir?

[Dave Burns]

On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 6:00 PM, Joe Smith <jes at martnet.com> wrote:
> Can you just skip the .gvfs items specifically, by name, with -prune?

man page on find -prune was not clear to me, but I tried all combos I
can think of, nothing works as I'd wish:

[tburns at cod ~]$ sudo find /users/tburns|wc -l
find: /users/tburns/.gvfs: Permission denied
8620
[tburns at cod ~]$ sudo find /users/tburns -name .gvfs -prune
find: /users/tburns/.gvfs: Permission denied
[tburns at cod ~]$ sudo find /users/tburns -prune -name .gvfs
[tburns at cod ~]$ sudo find /users/tburns \( -prune -name .gvfs \)
[tburns at cod ~]$ sudo find /users/tburns \( -name .gvfs -prune \)
find: /users/tburns/.gvfs: Permission denied

Note that without the -prune, over 8000 lines get output. No
combination including -prune ever generated a single line of non-error
output. Which means I don't understand what -prune is doing, or is
supposed to be doing. .gvfs is empty, so there should be lots of
output even if it got pruned.

And now that I've logged out & back in and .gvfs is mounted again, I
can test the other suggested workaround involving remount. This also
does not work for me, though I may be giving the wrong form of mount
command:

[tburns at cod ~]$ sudo mount -o remount -o exec -o suid  -o rw /users/tburns/.gvfs
[tburns at cod ~]$ sudo find /users/tburns/.gvfs
find: /users/tburns/.gvfs: Permission denied

One of the side-effects of killing my gvfs process was that my
ssh-agent died, or at least stopped working. Otherwise I'd seriously
consider just killing it as the most elegant workaround.

Thanks for all the input.

Dave