Peter da Silva wrote:
> On 01-Nov-2007, at 18:03, Michael G Schwern wrote:
>> $ find . -print0 -name '*.txt' | xargs -0 rm
>
> That's a mistake.
THANK YOU CAPTAIN OBVIOUS!
>> Whoopsie, everything's deleted. 10 gigs of fine public educational
>> video,
>> gone. Turns out putting -print0 first instead of last causes some
>> sort of
>> crazy find switch boolean madness to short circuit and everything
>> becomes true.
>
> Nope, the result of the expression is exactly the same as before.
>
> Consider the difference between "find ... -print -exec something '{}'
> ';'" and "find ... -exec something '{}' ';' -print".
That sort of "pin the quotes on the expression" game you have to play with
-exec that I always get wrong is why I use xargs.
> The former prints out all the files it's applying "something" to, so you
> know what you somethinged.
>
> The latter prints out all the files for which "something" succeeded, so
> you know what the something files are.
>
> There's nothing crazy about it at all. It's not a flag, if it was a flag
> it would be a single character
That you say that like it should be obvious is, in and of itself, crazy.
> It's a term in an expression. The hateful
> thing isn't that it behaved that way, it's that they put a "-" in front
> of the terms in the expression instead of something else like "+" or "="
> so you wouln't think it was some kind of long format option.
Bingo. Different things should look different.
> They should
> have been able to see 15 years into the future and realize that when
> people started using versions of getopt (something else that didn't
> exist when find was written) that supported long options that people
> would decide that find was just doing the same thing.
Or, maybe, 15 years later, we'd be using something better than find.
--
Just call me 'Moron Sugar'.
http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp05182002.shtml
