On 2007-11-01 at 19:24 -0500, Peter da Silva wrote: > On 01-Nov-2007, at 19:16, A. Pagaltzis wrote: >> Well find will get on your case if you mix paths and predicates >> anyway. > > Yes, they could have just had one token to say "that's the last file, the > rest is an expression". That would also have worked.
-prune is an action, not a selector. If people learn -prune, I find (hah!) that they suddenly start to understand find(1) better, as things click. find blah -whatever -prune -o -whichever -print Eg: $ find /dev \( -type b -o -type c \) -prune -o -print This is informative on FreeBSD: $ find -L /dev \( -type b -o -type c \) -prune -o \! -type d -print (spots the socket) whilst this Ubuntu derivative has so much crap littering about the filesystem that it's necessary to instead: $ find /dev \( -type b -o -type c \) -prune -o \! \( -type d -o -type l \) -print Now, if someone seems to be doing well in an interview (understanding quoting is done by the shell would be a nice enough change) then it's fun to check if they can spot the security hole in $ find /tmp -blah -print0 | xargs -0 rm -- And yeah, if you know the answer then, uhm, can I tempt you to apply for a job? :)
