Jonathan Stowe <j...@gellyfish.com> wrote:
On Thu, 2007-11-01 at 18:35 -0500, Peter da Silva wrote:
And then they should have realised that those crazy GNU guys would
make the final "-print" optional, so it looked even more like a flag.
Because it's not.
Yes it was at this point that I started to realize something was wrong
with GNU find.
Not to mention making the pathname optional.
Yes, I had a cron script that passed a glob into the pathname that
happened to resolve to nothing one day due to a change elsewhere. So
GNU find guessed I meant . (which was also /) and proceeded to delete
all the files on my harddisk while I wasn't there to stop it.
Fortunately it only got as far as /lib/libc.so.1 and then rm stopped
working. Still, left one hell of a mess to recover from. Yes, thanks
GNU.
Was GNU really the first to make -print optional though? It's been
optional on most unixen for a long time, certainly HP-UX from nearly
20 years ago, SYS V, BSD (not sure when from), OS/F, IRIX. Optional
pathname though, certainly didn't work on any of those (excluding
modern BSD).
Cheers,
Martin.
