bash - How to quickly find all git repos under a directory

Question

The following bash script is slow when scanning for .git directories because it looks at every directory. If I have a collection of large repositories it takes a long time for find to churn through every directory, looking for .git. It would go much faster if it would prune the directories within repos, once a .git directory is found. Any ideas on how to do that, or is there another way to write a bash script that accomplishes the same thing?

#!/bin/bash

# Update all git directories below current directory or specified directory

HIGHLIGHT="e[01;34m"
NORMAL='e[00m'

DIR=.
if [ "$1" != "" ]; then DIR=$1; fi
cd $DIR>/dev/null; echo -e "${HIGHLIGHT}Scanning ${PWD}${NORMAL}"; cd ->/dev/null

for d in `find . -name .git -type d`; do
  cd $d/.. > /dev/null
  echo -e "
${HIGHLIGHT}Updating `pwd`$NORMAL"
  git pull
  cd - > /dev/null
done

---

Specifically, how would you use these options? For this problem, you cannot assume that the collection of repos is all in the same directory; they might be within nested directories.

top
  repo1
  dirA

  dirB
     dirC
        repo1

Answer 1

Check out Dennis' answer in this post about find's -prune option:

How to use '-prune' option of 'find' in sh?

find . -name .git -type d -prune

Will speed things up a bit, as find won't descend into .git directories, but it still does descend into git repositories, looking for other .git folders. And that 'could' be a costly operation.

What would be cool is if there was some sort of find lookahead pruning mechanism, where if a folder has a subfolder called .git, then prune on that folder...

That said, I'm betting your bottleneck is in the network operation 'git pull', and not in the find command, as others have posted in the comments.