Re: [9fans] Oooops...where is ls -R gone?

["Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net>]

dmr@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> No, [find(1)] was there, in 6th and 7th editions and thereafter.
> A xenograft from USG, but there, albeit with a BUGS section
> saying "The syntax is painful."

Unfortunately, there has never (to my knowledge) been a really
satisfactory tree walker in any version of UNIX.  Even "xargs",
which one would think would be debugged by now, fails when
there are spaces, ampersands, etc. in leaf names.  I know of
several attempts to provide library or kernel support for tree
walking; the reason none were specified for POSIX <dirent.h>
(which I was the main proponent for) was that none of them had
worked well enough in practice to make a convincing case that
they should be standardized.  I think this is a solvable problem
for which a really good solution would eventually attract users.