find(1) mishandles multiple -newer options - fix included

John P. Linderman jpl at allegra.UUCP
Tue Oct 22 05:25:55 AEST 1985


> From: mp at allegra.UUCP (Mark Plotnick)
>> From jpl at allegra.UUCP (John P. Linderman)
>> The following diffs to the BSD 4.2 source correct the problem,
>> and add a dozen options.  (Only a few options are genuinely
>> useful, but it was cleaner to add them all than to prune out
>> the useless ones.)
> Look out, world!  I was just showing Linderman a bug in "ls" this morning...

Hoist with my own petard, eh?  The changes only add two new
``concepts'', the use of access times or inode change times instead of
file modification times.  Then the two files, the backwards-compatible
defaults, and simple combinatorics generate a dozen possibilities.
Those ending with one or more m's are ``useless'' in the sense that the
same effect can be obtained by leaving the m's off, but they are
``useful'' because they provide a consistent mapping to the underlying
concepts.  By this reckoning, adding the n+1'st flag to ls adds 2**n
new options, so a dozen is pretty modest.  But now that you mention it,
it would be nice to have a flag to ls that caused all unprintable
characters in file names to ...

John P. Linderman  Finder of lost options  allegra!jpl



More information about the Comp.unix.wizards mailing list