Does find command work on Time Machine Volumes

Trying to help someone search for instances of a file that is within a Time Machine backup. When using the UNIX find command it seems to take a lot longer to run than one would expect with the amount of data on the Time Machine disk.
Does anyone know if find (in 10.5.8) can search Time Machine backups?

I've had a find running on my TM disk for about 4 hours now and it hasn't returned anything. Don't think it should take that long to search through ~350 Gig worth of files.
But it doesn't look like 350GB to find. Rather it looks like 350GB times the number of TimeMachine increments you have.
Or more correctly, if you have 1 million files on your disk (I actually have 1.2 million), and if you have 50 TimeMachine increments, then find thinks you have 50 million files to be searched.
And most likely each file access is going to be at least 1 disk access, so that would be 50 million disk accesses. Your typical hard disk is good for 50 to 100 disk accesses per second, so that could be over 100 hours on a good day. That seems a bit long, so my guess about 1 access per file is most likely too high, but I'm still sure that accessing 50 million files is going to take a long time (hours).

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