8.2.1.3 Working with automounters

Where an automounter is in use on systems that do not support O_FOLLOW, it can be the case that the use of the chdir() system call can itself cause a new filesystem to be mounted at that point. This will cause find's security check to fail. However, this does not normally represent a security problem (since the automounter configuration is normally set up by the system administrator). Therefore, if the chdir() sanity check fails, find will check to see if a new filesystem has been mounted at the current directory; if so, find will issue a warning message and continue.

To make this solution work, find reads the list of mounted filesystems at startup, and again when the sanity check fails. It compares the two lists to find out if the directory it has moved into has just been mounted.