[bug #20970] Trailing slash on directory arguments breaks -name

[Ross Kendall Axe]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?20970>

                 Summary: Trailing slash on directory arguments breaks -name
                 Project: findutils
            Submitted by: rossaxe
            Submitted on: Tuesday 04/09/07 at 07:19
                Category: find
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Wrong result
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
         Originator Name: 
        Originator Email: 
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                 Release: 4.2.31
           Fixed Release: None

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Details:

The following commands illustrate the problem:

$ mkdir -p foo/bar
$ find foo -name foo
foo
$ find foo/ -name foo

The first command returns the directory 'foo', as expected, but the second
one does not find it, apparently because the trailing / was considered to be
part of the filename.  The following test seems to confirm this:

$ find foo/ -name foo/
find: warning: Unix filenames usually don't contain slashes (though pathnames
do).  That means that '-name foo/' will probably evaluate to false all the
time on this system.  You might find the '-wholename' test more useful, or
perhaps '-samefile'.  Alternatively, if you are using GNU grep, you could use
'find ... -print0 | grep -FzZ foo/'.
foo/

Despite the warning message about slashes in the -name match, it does in fact
work.  This issue is probably related to the following oddity:

$ find foo
foo
foo/bar
$ find foo/
foo/
foo/bar

The first command is perfectly consistent in that it doesn't have trailing
slashes in the output, but the second command does have a trailing slash on
one directory, but not the other.  I'm not entirely sure whether this
behaviour is a good thing or not.  Possibly the second command should produce
'foo//bar' (2 slashes) for consistency.

There is a similar effect when using -wholename, but that may actually be the
best behaviour.




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