AIX find indeed does not have the -maxdepth flag option. The man page returns this for the -prune flag on my AIX 5.2 system. Only one find also, /usr/bin/find

-prune Always evaluates to the value True. Stops the descent of the current path name if it is a directory. If the -depth flag is specified, the -prune flag is ignored.

Some "creative" use of grep / sed / awk applied against the find output should allow you to select only to a (selected) depth; given a relatively stable structure, you might also be as well off by driving from a stored list of directories instead of "building on the fly".

Well yes, you can do this:

find /tmp/* -prune

which limits the search to only the /tmp directory (no subdirs). However, "/tmp/*" is evaluated by the shell before being passed to "find" and could possibly exceed the maximum allowed length.

And while it is certainly possible to parse the output for the desired results, this does not stop the "find" command from needless searching. The find could be lengthy if the filesystem is large and/or over a network.

Without a "maxdepth" option, the best way to list all files in a given directory is:

(cd $DIR && find . ! -name . -prune)

Other options to "find" can be added as needed, and the parentheses can be removed if the changedir is not bothersome.

Thanks Dave, again. I was doing this on Solaris machine, no maxdepth also, using prune with -d option, wrong, the AIX help where it says, don't use with -d, fixed the problem, works like charm now.

For running find on a directory with many thousand files, the above command with "*" does not work, and fails with "The parameter or environment lists are too long.".
Any easy alternative to this??

i had a problem with find command !! it also search for files to subfolders as below :

[root@omu-au213 ~]# find /var/tmp/test/ -name "*properties" -type f -exec ls -l {} \;

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15 Dec 13 12:04 /var/tmp/test/1.properties
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18 Dec 13 12:04 /var/tmp/test/2.properties
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9 Dec 13 12:35 /var/tmp/test/test1/3.properties

i resolved the issue using maxdepth as below
[root@omu-au213 ~]# find /var/tmp/test/ -maxdepth 1 -name "*properties" -type f -exec ls -l {} \;
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15 Dec 13 12:04 /var/tmp/test/1.properties
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18 Dec 13 12:04 /var/tmp/test/2.properties

BUT this maxdepth does not work on AIX unit. please help me to find exactly the same output as (find /var/tmp/test/ -maxdepth 1 -name "*properties" -type f -exec ls -l {} \;) for AIX unit too.