find giving bad status?

[Michael Nolan]

gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:

>In article <188 at eeocdt.UUCP> darrell at eeocdt.UUCP (DArrell Tschakert) writes:
>-In article <2029 at tssi.UUCP> tssi!nolan writes:
>->For the past few months, whenever I do a 'find', I get a whole bunch of
>->lines like the following:
>-Please give us a bit more information. How were you using the find 
>-command? What options? What directory were you sitting in.
>-Do the following examples  give you errors:
>-	find / -print
>-	find . -print
>-	find / -name prof -print     
>-Are their any examples of find usage that never cause errors messages to
>-be generated? Are their any examples that always cause problems?

>Oh, good grief!  What is the point of your suggestions, other than to
>show that you aren't qualified to be answering the query at all?

>No additional information is needed to answer tssi!nolan's query:

>"find: bad status" messages simply mean that a stat() of the file failed.
>The usual cause of this is a symbolic link whose target does not exist.

Hey, chill out!  I didn't think the question was all that unreasonable,
myself, although I did think I had already answered it.  (It happens with
*every* find, regardless of who runs it or where it starts, etc.)
 
The problem shows up on directories/files I haven't changed in years, some
I've never consciously used, and some fairly recent ones.  It *is* consistent
in that the same messages always appear.  I'm not using symbolic links,
so I don't think that's the problem.  My local guru says he's seen something
like this before, and it was something rather weird that caused it.  However,
he's forgotten just what it was.  fsck isn't reporting anything out of the
ordinary.
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Michael Nolan                               This is my .sig
Internet:  nolan at helios.unl.edu             T*His_iS#MY%.SIg oN DrUGs!@%#@%
UUCP:      tssi!nolan                       Any questions?