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.