I wanted to discover the number of files on my system.
I found on the Web the suggestion that the way to do so was to type in
the Terminal, as user, "find / \! -type -d | wc -l" and then press "Enter".
I did that. The names of quite a few files appeared on the screen, each
with the words "Permission denied" after it, and then, ultimately, the
number 153,406.
I decided to issue the command as root instead, to see what happened.
No file names appeared on the screen as they had before. I just got the
number 154,821. That was 1,415 more than earlier, though the number of
filenames which had appeared with "Permission denied" the first time
round was nowhere near as many as 1,415.
I next edited my sudoers file, so that, as user, I didn't need to enter
a password in order to run "find".
I then typed, as user, "sudo", followed by the command I'd typed twice
before. That time, I got the number 154,722.
Can anyone explain to me why I've been getting the different results
that I have?
