ugh.book

Find 167

I don’t want to have to check out every directory in the tree I give to

find—that should be find’s job, dammit. I don’t want to mung the

system software every time misfeatures like this come up. I don’t

want to waste my time fighting SUN or the entire universe of Unix

weeniedom. I don’t want to use Unix. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate,

hate, hate.

—Ken (feeling slightly better but still pissed)

Writing a complicated shell script that actually does something with the
files that are found produces strange results, a sad result of the shell’s
method for passing arguments to commands.

Date: Sat, 12 Dec 92 01:15:52 PST

From: Jamie Zawinski <[email protected]>

Subject: Q: what’s the opposite of ‘find?’ A: ‘lose.’

To: UNIX-HATERS

I wanted to find all .el files in a directory tree that didn’t have a

corresponding .elc file. That should be easy. I tried to use find.

What was I thinking.

First I tried:

% find. -name ’*.el’ -exec ’test -f {}c’

find: incomplete statement

Oh yeah, I remember, it wants a semicolon.

% find. -name ’*.el’ -exec ’test -f {}c’ \;

find: Can’t execute test -f {}c:

No such file or directory

Oh, great. It’s not tokenizing that command like most other things

do.

% find. -name ’*.el’ -exec test -f {}c \;

Well, that wasn’t doing anything...

% find. -name ’*.el’ -exec echo test -f {}c \;

test -f c

test -f c

test -f c

test -f c