Re: findutils 4.1.7

[Bob Proulx]

Hello Khamis

Please keep the discussion on the mailling list by doing a list
reply instead of an individual reply.  If your mailer lacks the
list followup functionality then please at the least use the group
followup action instead of doing an individual reply.  (When doing a
group followup there is no need to CC me since I read the lists.  But
I won't usually say anything about that.)

khamis Siksek wrote:
> Will i totally understand what you are talking about, but, to give you a
> clearer example on why i did use find and rm -rf, assume you want to
> search in the cvs repository for the directory CVS (the administrative
> directory) and you want to delete all the instances of the directory
> then you will need to do find with rm -rf
> example
> 
> find ./cvs -name CVS -exec rm -rf {} \;
> 
> In such case you need rm -rf, or xargs
> 
> find ./cvs -name CVS | xargs rm -rf
> 
> or another way
> 
> rm -rf `find ./cvs -name CVS`
> 
> Well i use the first one usually, but the behavior is not expected, find
> should find the SOMETHING directory then apply the -exec command, what i
> see happens is find finds the SOMETHING directory, applies the -exec
> command, and then tries to find it again or something like that which
> shouldn't be the case. As i remember, on Solaris the Sun implementation
> for find doesn't have this problem, unfortenutely i don't have Sun
> machines to verify what i am talking about, but it confuses the user
> when you ask it to "Search and Destroy" something and it returns that it
> didn't find while it found it and destroyed it.

It seems to me without checking that adding '-depth' to the find
options would eliminate your issue because it would force find to do
the traversal first.  Does that solve your issue?

> Hope that a clarified the issue, i tried to see the problem myself in
> the findutils source code, but unfortunetely also the findutils i
> downloaded is not compilable on RedHat 9.0
> 
> BTW: I would to notify you that it is confusing that the latest stable
> version is back to 1995 or something, is it really the latest stable
> version? since i looked in the unstable versions and i found that you
> things you are working on in year 2003
> 
> Best regards and sorry if i disturbed you,

The find command's previous maintainer has become inactive.  So yes,
the latest stable version of find is very old.  Since then it has been
picked up by another developer and there recently has been much
activity.  Expect another stable release with updates and bug fixes
sometime in the near future as find is being worked on and maintained
once again.

Bob