> The feature is in two new parametres -D --dirsonly and -F --filesonly when > you want to change mods recursively only to files or only to directoris. > (because of changing +x mode to directories by using chmod -R 755 . makes me > angry, because +x mode will be changed on files too.) Making scripts > find-based makes me dizzy.
First off thank you for submitting code. It is most appreciated when people take the time to create a code patch. However, I do not think that this functionality is needed or desired in chmod for two reasons. For one the X option already does exactly what you are asking for. Here is an example. chmod -R a+rX dir This recursively makes all files and directories readable and all directories searchable. Which sounds exactly like what you are proposing but in a standard and portable manor. This is documented in the "Conditional Executability" section of the info manual for chmod. Use 'info chmod' to access the manual. Secondly people frequently wonder why cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, ls, mv, rmdir, rm, touch, do not support 'find' command type of operations. This is part of the subtle but beautiful design of the UNIX system. Programs should be simple and modular. Common behavior should be modularized into a common location where it can be used by other programs. More complicated programs are created by chaining together simpler programs. If every program implemented its own version of file finding then every command would implement it differently and with its own set of bugs and unique behavior. This would lead to many bugs and much code bloat. This is already true of the number of different ways to specify -r or -R and other similar behaviors. It is much better to modularize the problem and provide a file recursion mechanism that is outside of any particular program but then common to all of them. Here are various examples using find. The 'find' command is very powerful and I encourage you to look into it. Although your particular example does not need find it could be implemented with find using the first of the following. But find can also be used in other ways with other programs. Here are a few random examples. This is why file finding should be left as a common feature of all programs by being outside of them all. This is just off the top of my head. find . -type d | xargs chmod a+rx find . -name README | xargs chmod 0644 find . -type f | xargs chgrp other find . -name '*.pl' | xargs ls -ld find . -name '*.html' | xargs grep foo When people find that particular combinations of commands are ones that they use a lot then they will typically create a shell script, a shell function or a shell alias which does this with a shorter name. I like shell scripts because they are easier to pass around. #!/bin/sh find "$@" -name README -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ld You could call it whatever you desired. For all intents and purposes it would be just like a normal UNIX command and its output could be piped into other commands. The modularity and the building up of a more powerful command from smaller commands is in the unix philosophy. HTH Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-fileutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-fileutils
