[CentOS] Finding user's files

Paul Heinlein
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 15:26:44 -0000

On Wed, 1 Aug 2018, mark wrote:

> This is among the things we need to do when a user leaves, and it's
> a larger question than it sounds. Our Office has many servers, with
> a good number of fileservers for projects, with large filesystems
> (i.e. 10's of TB). Can anyone think of a way *other* than running
> what's probably a many-hour long find / -user on all our systems,
> which is really intensive, to find all the files own by a given
> user?
>
> Locate would be great, but from the man pages and what I can find
> online, it only stores filenames and paths.

The only way I know is to keep an updated database of metadata, which
may be a security vulnerability depending on its accessibility and the
nature of your work. The Robinhood engine was written for this sort of
purpose:

https://github.com/cea-hpc/robinhood/wiki

That said, we use Robinhood on a single lustre filesystem. I don't
know how if you can set up a central instance across several file
servers or if each filesystem would need its own engine.

--
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45?38' N, 122?6' W