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Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2005 10:36:12 -0700
To: bug-coreutils AT gnu DOT org, cygwin AT cygwin DOT com,
   Luke Kendall <luke DOT kendall AT cisra DOT canon DOT com DOT au>
Subject: Re: Path confusion
Message-ID: <20050401173612.GA8116@dementia.proulx.com>
Mail-Followup-To: bug-coreutils AT gnu DOT org, cygwin AT cygwin DOT com, Luke Kendall <luke DOT kendall AT cisra DOT canon DOT com DOT au>
References: <20050401071130 DOT 2051685080 AT pessard DOT research DOT canon DOT com DOT au> <424D4BA9 DOT 2010507 AT byu DOT net>
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From: bob AT proulx DOT com (Bob Proulx)

Eric Blake wrote:
> [moving feature request portion of thread to bug-coreutils]
> 
> According to Luke Kendall on 4/1/2005 12:11 AM:
> >>>> find / -xdev -user "$USER" -print0 | xargs -0 chown Administrators.SYSTEM
> >>>
> >>>  You must mean 'chown -R --from="$USER" ...' :-)  
> >>  
> >> Hmm, sounds better still.  :-) 

No, that sounds worse.

Using 'find' is a shared and powerful interface to all of the tools.
Adding all of find's features to every tool is bad.  It bloats every
tool.  Even if you are careful with options there will eventually be
conflicts leading to unique implementations in every tool.  It
violates the GNU/UNIX principle of modularity where small tools are
used to create more powerful tools.

Using find is also more maintainable because in the future as a new
feature is required or added to filesystem traversal, such as your
-xdev option, it is then available to all uses of it.  If those
features were added to individual tools such as grep and chown and
diff and snurble then every single command in the world would need to
have that feature added individually.  There is no leverage in that
case.

> > D'oh!  Not possible: there's no -xdev option on chown, so that would
> > do a whole lot more chown-ing than intended, as it reached across the
> > network, or at least into other mount points under "/"  ...
> 
> How about it - does it make sense to add an --xdev option to all of the
> recursive descent tools (chown, chmod, ls, ...) to force the recursion to
> stop at mount points, or is find/xargs the only supported idiom for this?

Please no.  The find command already implements all of those features
and many more.

Is it even a possible task to enumerate all of the tools, not just
coreutils but all of the project tools, that have directory traversal
built into them?  If you have a hard time enumerating them then
attempting to make a global change across them is even more difficult.

Bob

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