find -exec surprisingly slow

[Paul A. Hoadley]

Hello,

I'm in the process of cleaning a Maildir full of spam.  It has
somewhere in the vicinity of 400K files in it.  I started running
this yesterday:

find . -atime +1 -exec mv {} /home/paulh/tmp/spam/sne/ \;

It's been running for well over 12 hours.  It certainly is
working---the spams are slowly moving to their new home---but it is
taking a long time.  It's a very modest system, running 4.8-R on a
P2-350.  I assume this is all overhead for spawning a shell and
running mv 400K times.  Is there a better way to move all files based
on some characteristic of their date stamp?  Maybe separating the find
and the move, piping it through xargs?  It's mostly done now, but I
will know better for next time.


-- 
Paul.

w  http://logicsquad.net/
h  http://paul.hoadley.name/
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