[bug #23920] find.1: please add short note about no trailing slashes for directories

[M. Buecher]

Follow-up Comment #6, bug #23920 (project findutils):

I ran into a similar problem with find 4.4.0 (in Debian 5.0.0), and got it
sorted out.
This bug consists of several parts, so I will try to give a summary first,
then explain in detail from general down to this specific issue.
By the way this behaviour seems to be a side effect of the fix for
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?20970

Summary:
1. "-path" works as designed with a simple sting comparison
2. the man-page is misleading (especially the term "shell pattern")
3. inconsistent behaviour if a given search path is part of the result and
has a leading slash

Preparation for examples:
cd ~
mkdir -p find1/test1

Details:
1 & 2. Result Lines & "-path" expression / man-page
a) Result lines of an object never have a trailing slash. It's always
/path/to/something, where something can be a file, directory, link, whatever
b) "-path" does a simple string comparison towards the object's result line.

The man page is misleading as it uses the term "shell pattern", but it's just
a dumb string pattern.
The Debian man page tries to explain it with "the metacharacters do not treat
‘/’ or ‘.’ specially;", but then the reader is already on the wrong
train named "shell pattern" (e.g. /etc/../tmp/../usr/bin)
See documenation at
http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_mono/find.html#Full-Name-Patterns)


Therefore if you check for a specific directory use "-path
/direct/path/to/directory" without a trailing slash.
Use boolean logic and the "-type" expression to avoid problems with files,
links, etc. that could have the same path.

Note that the result line of an object differs depending on the given search
path, you have take care of this in your "-path" expressions.

Example:
cd ~
find find1 ./find1 ~/find1 -type d -name "test1"
=>  find1/test1
=>  ./find1/test1
=>  /root/find1/test1 (or /home/<user>/find1/test1)

3. The bug is that the result line doesn't comply to the rule of 1a, if the
search path itself is the tested object and it was stated with a trailing
slash.

Example:
find find1 find2/ -type d

The fix would be to apply the functionality of GNU --strip-trailing-slashes
(see
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Trailing-slashes.html),
in a similar way discussed for https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?20970


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