find and glob

[Mark Hills]

We traverse portions of our filesystem and apply a find action to them; 
currently by allowing the shell to expand the glob; eg.

  find ./*/xx/*/yy

But the expansion can be large and problematic before being passed to 
find.

To do the equivalent in find itself is slow. The whole hierarchy is 
traversed (which is slow), and only matching results displayed:

  find . -path './*/xx/*/yy'

Is there a way to have find itself only visit the relevant portions of the 
filesystem?

The manual [1] seems to suggest using locate and xargs. Keeping an index 
is not practical for us, so I wrote a simple command around the glob(3) 
function to do the traversal and print to stdout. Am I missing some well 
established method here?

Please keep me CC'd, as I read from the archives. Many thanks.

[1] 
http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_mono/find.html#Fast-Full-Name-Search

-- 
Mark