Re: Interaction between -o and the default-print

[James Youngman]

On Sun, Oct 31, 2004 at 04:14:38PM -0700, Bob Proulx wrote:
> James Youngman wrote:
> > I have modified the findutils development code (parser.c) so that if
> > the user specifies an option after a non-option, a warning message is
> > issued.  This does not occur for the -follow and -daystart options,
> > because those options affect only those tests appearing after them on
> > the command line, and to such positioning might be deliberate and
> > correct.
> 
> I am sorry but I did not quite follow the description.  Could you post
> an example and show how your recent change affects it?  How it would
> have behaved before and now after with this change?

$ find . -mindepth 3 -ls >/dev/null
$ find . -ls -mindepth 3  >/dev/null
find: warning: you have specified the -mindepth option after a non-option 
argument -ls, but options are not positional (-mindepth affects tests specified 
before it as well as those specified after it).  Please specify options before 
other arguments.

$ find . -ls -follow  >/dev/null
$


Previously, the second example would not have generated a warning
message.  Apart from this warning, the output is the same before and
after the change.

I do wonder though if this attempt to be helpful will simply be
irritating.  However, there are a couple of defect reports that have
been raised which would have been avoided if this error message had
been implemented.   Some people do seem to assume that things like 

 find . \( -name foo -print \) -o \( -mindepth 2 -type d -print \) 

will work, and print out instances of "foo" which are in the current
directory.


Regards,
James.