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8.2.1.4 Problems with dead NFS servers

Examining every mount point on the system has a downside too. In general, find will be used to search just part of the filesystem. However, find examines every mount point. If the system has a filesystem mounted on an unresponsive NFS server, find will hang, waiting for the NFS server to respond. Worse, it does this even if the affected mount point is not within the directory tree that find would have searched anyway.

This is very unfortunate. However, this problem only affects systems that have no support for O_FOLLOW. As far as I can tell, it is not possible on such systems to fix all three problems (the race condition, the false-alarm at automount mount points, and the hang at startup if there is a dead NFS server) at once. If you have some ideas about how find could do this better, please send email to the bug-findutils@gnu.org mailing list.