Restricting recursive searching to the starting filesystem(s) of the target search paths

[genivia-inc]

To start off with discussions, I'm thinking it might be useful to others to include closed issue #349 here as a Q&A.

Question

I'd like to always restrict the search to the filesystems of all paths which are given on the command line during interactive usage, as find -xdev does. As a common example:

$ ug pattern /var

should search inside the filesystem of /var, but exclude any other fs (such as a nested tmpfs). The --include-fs option requires doubling all the arguments, which doesn't really work well with shell aliases or functions. For example, if I give two starting paths on two filesystems, it's generally implied I want both filesystems to be included:

$ ug pattern /fs1 /fs2

which would require --include-fs=/fs1,/fs2 or two extra args. The suggested --include-fs=. is not really a good substitute for this behavior, since very often $CWD has nothing to do with the searched paths.

Answer

Use option --exclude-fs without a mount path.

$ ug --exclude-fs pattern /fs1 /fs2

When --exclude-fs argument MOUNTS is not specified, only descends into the file systems associated with the specified file and directory search targets, i.e. excludes all other file systems, like find -xdev.

By contrast, --include-fs without a MOUNTS argument restricts searching the working directory file system only, as if --include-fs=. was specified.

[genivia-inc]

Note: see answer in the question post.