bug#15504: 24.3; find-dired's numerous prompts are inflexible and annoying

[Kevin Rodgers]

On 10/1/13 7:45 PM, Trent W. Buck wrote:
> I prefer to do M-x grep RET and then type something complicated like
>
>      grep -r --include '*.c' --exclude-dir .git . -e foo -e bar
>
> ...rather than M-x rgrep which has lots of stupid prompts that then get
> stuck together in a fixed kind of way.
>
> In the same vein, I hate M-x find dired RET multiple prompts.  For a few
> years I've been using a munged up replacement that just asks for a
> single command, and runs it (below).  The history handling is a bit
> buggered, and it breaks the existing multi-prompt style (presumably some
> people prefer it).

I'm afraid I don't get what you're saying, since `M-x find-dired' only prompts
for the directory to search and the long string of arguments you love to type:

        find-dired is an interactive autoloaded Lisp function in
        `find-dired.el'.
        
        (find-dired DIR ARGS)
        
        Run `find' and go into Dired mode on a buffer of the output.
        The command run (after changing into DIR) is
        
            find . \( ARGS \) -ls
        
        except that the variable `find-ls-option' specifies what to use
        as the final argument.

And the implementation confirms the documentation:

        (defun find-dired (dir args)
        ...
          (interactive (list (read-file-name "Run find in directory: " nil "" t)
                             (read-string "Run find (with args): " find-args
                                          '(find-args-history . 1))))

...

> PS: find -ls's output is actually crap, because the entries don't line
> up properly and files with spaces become "foo\ bar" which dired mode
> doesn't like, so I generally end up doing "find -exec ls -lidsh {} +".

Apparently that is what `find-ls-option' is for.

--
Kevin Rodgers
Denver, Colorado, USA