Re: [9fans] find command reloaded

[John Stalker <stalker@maths.tcd.ie>]

> interesting. OK, my idea sucks due to a lack of foresight on my part :-)

Your idea is fine.  I do similar things all the time, but using
awk or sed or things like that to produce shell scripts is hard
to get right.  Harder than getting a find command right, which
was my point.  I'll grant that life is easier if the shell you're
piping to is /bin/rc than /bin/sh.

> So far, given the complexity of all the alternatives, I'm sticking
> with my grep -r. Yeah, it's gross to special-case something, but
> sometimes a special case has more use than a general case.

That's fine for Rudolf's situation, but most of my find commands
end in -delete.

> But, hey, if you don't like my idea don't use it. No feelings will be
> harmed; after all, I've only got one real user for smacme and it's not
> me :-)

I actually like your idea better than any of the others that were
suggested except for the idea of a native version of find.

> And if you like find, write and put it in contrib.

I'll put it on my to do list.  But things often stay on that list
for a long time. :-(

> I don't understand all the concern about whether this or that tool
> ends up in the "official" tree, or who is resistant to it. Plan 9 is a
> distributed OS. Roll your own tree. put it on bitbucket. Add all the
> stuff you think should be there. Maybe others will like it too. In the
> 70s just about every university had a Unix distro ... harvard, jhu, on
> and on ... it was only in the 80s that BSD became the choice item.
> With the tools we have today it's pretty easy to fork something. Who
> knows, you might pull a BSD :-)

We had one here at TCD, though that was well before my time.  These
days all the servers run FreeBSD.  Although I like plan9, I don't
think it's likely to get installed on those servers any time soon.

> ron
--
John Stalker
School of Mathematics
Trinity College Dublin
tel +353 1 896 1983
fax +353 1 896 2282