On 2017/01/07 11:32, Marc Espie wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 03, 2017 at 11:15:39PM +0100, Mark Kettenis wrote:
> > > From: "Ted Unangst" <t...@tedunangst.com>
> > > Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2017 16:39:48 -0500
> > >
> > > I copied this straight from freebsd. Not fixed, but feel free to correct
> > > as
> > > desired.
> > >
> > > This adds a third example showing -delete, mentioning that it's not
> > > standard,
> > > but also hinting that it may work better than "rm -r" when you want to
> > > delete
> > > directories.
> >
> > I really think we should not encourage unportable code like that by
> > giving an example in our manual page.
> >
> > I'm even tempted to say that you should leave the "-exec rm {} \;"
> > example alone. The + here only works because rm(1) accepts multiple
> > file arguments.
>
> Huh ? of course rm accepts multiple file arguments. All "good" unix commands
> accept multiple file arguments, fortunately. That's what makes +exec (or
> xargs for that matter) work.
I think the reason the example uses ; is probably because we only
added + relatively recently (2012), and adding an example using it
back then would make it harder for people writing scripts that
work on newer and older OpenBSD. Enough time has passed that this
isn't really an issue any more. But I would very much like to keep
an example using ; to demonstrate the shell quoting needed when
people have to use a bad command that only takes one file argument.
