On 02-Nov-2007, at 04:35, Martin Ebourne wrote:
Was GNU really the first to make -print optional though? It's been
optional on most unixen for a long time,
Errrr... no?
certainly HP-UX from nearly 20 years ago,
If so it was HP's own perversion.
SYS V,
Not up through SVR2.
BSD (not sure when from),
Not before the '90s.
OS/F,
What's that? OSF/1? Which one?
IRIX.
Irix is almost as clabbered as HP/UX, in completely different ways.
Googling tells me that POSIX added it, but not when:
Assuming the presence of -print was added to correct a
historical pitfall that plagues novice users, it is entirely upwards-
compatible from the historical System V find utility. In its simplest
form ( find directory), it could be confused with the historical BSD
fast find. The BSD developers agreed that adding -print as a default
expression was the correct decision and have added the fast find
functionality within a new utility called locate.
However, the FreeBSD man pages say that the locate utility was added
for 4.4BSD, in the early '90s, so that's was when it happened.
The oldest GNU man pages also have this behavior, but I can't find
revision history going back before Findutils 4.
