[bug #13212] -newer only examines it's target once at the start

[James Youngman]

Update of bug #13212 (project findutils):

                  Status:                    None => Invalid                
             Assigned to:                    None => jay                    
             Open/Closed:                    Open => Closed                 

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Follow-up Comment #1:

I'm not sure you really are using GNU find.  GNU find doesn't have an "-f"
option.

Anyway, I'm not going to make the change you suggest, for several reasons:

1. It's not unlikely that there are also scripts which assume the reverse
behaviour, because for example they are trying to generate  some kind of
incremental backup and need the timestamp to be unchanged.   This applies
especially to -anewer.  

2.  There are lots of other ways to achieve the sort of thing you have in
mind.  Here are two (untested) examples:

# an obvious way
find "$START" -newer "$TARGET" -exec test {} -nt "$TARGET" ";" -exec touch -r
"{}" "$TARGET" ";"

# an efficient way (for larger directory trees)
touch -r "$(find $START -printf "%T@:%p\n" | (unset LANG LC_COLLATE; sort -n
) | sed -ne '$ p' | cut -d: -f2-)" "$TARGET"

Lastly, findutils 4.1.7 is quite old now.  If you are planning to report bugs
in findutils, please check that current versions are not affected (in this
case findutils version 4.2.20).


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