Linux – find command no such file or directory error

Assuming you really need to be using find in order to recurse through subdirectories:

find /export/home/ftp \( -name console.log -or -name server.log \) -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} +

There are some files in the file system that aren't real files, but are instead hooks into the kernel. Some of those can be read from forever. Try

grep foo /dev/zero

to see this in action. Get ready to stop it with ctrl-C before it takes over the whole system.

If I wanted to do what you're doing, I'd enumerate the subdirectories of / that I wanted scanned, and make sure I only checked text files, probably with

cd /
find boot etc home lib lost+found media mnt opt root sbin tmp usr var -type f -exec grep needle {} /dev/null \;

Note how the list does not contain /dev, /proc, /sys or /selinux.