[comp.unix.questions] SunOS 4.1 error: "cannot stat <file>" with "find": help?

jfw@cello.mc.duke.edu (John Whitehead) (10/03/90)

Can anyone help me figure out why I get this error?  I tried posting
to the sun newsgroups but got no responses.

I have a problem on my SparcStation 1 running SunOS 4.1 with the command
"find": it gives me a "No such file" error for many files that do indeed
exist.  This did not occur when we were under 4.0.3.  The errors look
something like this:

find: cannot stat /tmp: No such file or directory
find: cannot stat /var: No such file or directory
find: cannot stat /dev: No such file or directory
find: cannot stat /mnt: No such file or directory
find: cannot stat /sbin: No such file or directory
find: cannot stat /bin: No such file or directory

and so on for dozens of file names of real files.  They reside in all of
our three physical drives, symbolically linked eventually to the root drive.
The commands we use that will cause the errors is

        find . -name <searchstring> -print

        find /var/preserve/ -mtime +7 -a -exec rm -f {} \;

and

        find / -name core -atime +7 -exec rm -f {} \;

The first one is something I tried typing as root from the root directory,
the second two are lines from a cron job.

Does anyonfe know what is going on here, and how I can correct whatever
we must have done (not done) when upgrading to 4.1?

Thanks.
    John Whitehead	               Internet:  jfw@neuro.duke.edu
    Department of Neurobiology                    jfw@well.sf.ca.us
    Duke University Medical Center     Bitnet:    white002@dukemc           
    Durham, North Carolina