Cygwin "find" returns nothing

Question

This command returns nothing in Cygwin running on Windows Server 2008 r2:

/usr/bin/find /

I get a slight pause, but no text is returned. No error, no results, etc. I've tried with different search paths, using arguments (like -type f), and set my cygwin path to just /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin. Nothing works.

Ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

That’s very strange behaviour and I’ve never come across anything like that while using Cygwin. I don’t have enough reputation points to ask for information using comments so I’ll just post the debugging techiques that I would use. Hopefully, they’ll be of use to anyone else who has similar issues.

Firstly, I’d try to verify that I was running the correct executable. Running find --version should return something like the following:

find (GNU findutils) 4.5.11

Packaged by Cygwin (4.5.11-1)

If I still wasn’t getting any output, I’d (install and) use Cygwin’s strace command:

mkdir testdir
strace -o find.out find testdir
rmdir testdir

strace allows you to see what calls a Cygwin executable makes to the Cygwin DLL. With the above command, the output of the find command is stored in find.out.

Unless you’re familiar with Windows system programming, much of it won’t make sense. However, looking through the output will still give you an idea of what the command is doing, e.g., the Cygwin PATH and other environment variables being passed to the command are captured. I usually search for open( to see what files the command (find) is attempting to use. Successful calls to the open function will be displayed like:

open: open(/home/anthony/t, 0x30C000)
open: open(., 0x400000)

Unsuccesful calls to open return a value of -1. Note that not all files that find attempts to open are actually required for the command to operate correctly. This is an example of one such unsuccesful attempt (the information in locale.alias would be read if it existed but it’s not necessary for find to do its job):

open: -1 = open(/usr/local/share/locale/locale.alias, 0x8000), errno 2

Note: I create (and then remove) the empty testdir directory so there isn’t an overwhelming amount of information captured to the strace output file.