Re: Shred: Add recursion operations [PATCH]

[Amr Ali]

Hi Eric,

I completely agree about the philosophy. But ...

1) I've seen a comment at shred.c:26 that indicates adding -R/-r/--recursive as
a TODO.
2) Adding recursion to shred is not bloat, it is in fact enabling shred to do
it's job, and to do it *well*.
3) On the command line, the overhead of first, having to type down all of the
find parameters, and second, the overhead of executing shred, quite literally,
on every single file is a waste of both time and resources. Adding a simple `-r`
flag, however, enhances usability dramatically compared to the find(1) solution.
4) It became more than obvious that a lot of users *do* want such ability if you
will, given the amount of postings online that talks/addresses the shred
recursion issue.
5) If `find` truly is made to enable recursion for all programs, why recursion
is available for chmod or chgrp, or the plethora of other tools?

Best regards,

On 12/09/2011 07:34 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 12/09/2011 10:22 AM, Amr Ali wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm not sure if this was discussed before, but I've got tired from having to
>> work around the lack of native recursion within `shred`. So, attached is a 
>> patch
>> to add recursion, including documentation.
> 
> Thanks for taking the effort to write a patch, but we probably won't
> accept this upstream.
> 
> The philosophy of the Unix toolset is for each tool to do one thing, and
> do it well, because then you can piece tools together to do larger
> things.  find(1) already exists to add recursion to ANY program, so
> rather than bloat shred(1) with recursion, you should instead couple
> shred and find together:
> 
> find dir -depth -exec shred --options {} +
> 

-- 
Amr Ali

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