Re: [bug #61774] Docs for find -delete out of sync

[Bernhard Voelker]

On 2/2/22 18:28, admin4 wrote:
> nah my mistake now got it:

sorry for your loss, again.

> find . -name *.doc -exec rm -rf {} \; # does the same as find . -name
> *.doc -delete

These are also bad examples for find(1) invocations:
please use proper quoting, and better get used to refine the search to limit
the effect of the action to the files or file types you really want to operate
on; here I'd always add '-type f'.

Furthermore, when deleting with find(1), I always first test what would be
deleted.  The documentation has quite some examples and hints.

> The manual page <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page>, which really
> used to be a manual /page/, is now a small volume, with a thousand options…

This is a specialty of GNU findutils.  Ideally and as the GNU guide recommends,
the man page should really be very terse and all the details should go into the
texinfo manual (where HTML and PDF formats get published as well).
E.g. the coreutils generate the man pages from --help output with some very
few additional information.
But the findutils keep a lot of redundant information in both the man page
and the texinfo manual for historic reasons.
Unfortunately, this yields quite some maintenance overhead, and there were
already discussions about how to solve this, but no-one has had the time
to fix this yet.  Contribution welcome.

Have a nice day,
Berny