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linuxmemes @lemmy.world

Björn Tantau @swg-empire.de

1y ago

Seriously, WTF is up with that?

29 comments

locate enjoyers unite.
- Corporate users in shambles because mlocate.db cannot be generated without root.
- Idk why but I've always been a locate enjoyer myself. But find has more usecases.
  
  Like what?
- Indeed! Covers most of the instances where I would otherwise have to use find.

What's up with find? I've got so used to fd that I don't understand what this is referring to
- When you want to find something in a different path than your current one you have to supply it as the first argument. When you try to do find -name foo.bar /path it will complain that the path should be the first argument. So it knows what you're trying to do and instead of doing it it just complaints.
  
  Back in the day, find required that you added "-print" to actually print out the results in the terminal. That was bad UX, and now -print is the default. But.. following some syntax like supplying path as first argument for find is necessary to not create ambiguity in some cases, and enforcing it makes it more readable imho.
  
  That's already the friendly variant. Traditional find has a mandatory path as first argument, so to find in the current directory you need to do find .
  It also doesn't know if it really is a path - it just prints that as a likely error. You might just have messed up quoting an argument.
  
  Nice, UX is clearly a top priority (;
  I'll have to try and see if FD does the same bullshit though
  
  And if you do find . it prepends every result with a dot.

I don’t mind the order of path, arguments and options, but what the hell is the deal with long arguments with a single dash? i.e. -name instead of —-name

Positional params are the work of the devil; what starts as shorthand quickly turns into a horrible mess

find's expressions are order-sensitive and look like options, which is probably why the real options go zeroth, then the starting path goes first. Also, there is a -path-match expression that means something different than that starting path.
That said, there's nothing stopping the writing of a wrapper script that allows any placement or intermingling of any of those groupings.
The simplest would just grab the last argument and use it in the first position, which I'm guessing is what the meme creator really wants. Watch out for the edge case of whitespace in the path name. (And the edge case of the edge case where the end part of that path is valid but not the intended target.)

The world if we could use wildcards on ADB push/pull directly..

But…. Path is the first argument to find?
It’s the -exec syntax that’s so wacky. But use it for 20 years and you’ll remember it.

Not an expert nor a historian, but my understanding is that 'find' goes back a long way (*nix has been around a while).
Earlier commands such as find were created back before a lot of command/option syntax forms we know today were agreed to and standardized.
Since 'find' has been around so long, we've just suffered its non-standard syntax rather than risk the chaos that would be unleashed by trying to fix it.
If it makes you feel better, you can console yourself that you're using one of the more arcane incantations of the elder *nix wizards.
- When a link contains parentheses, you have to escape them... or else.
  'find' goes back a long way
  
  Please try it again and let me know if this fixed it. Both versions work on my end.

The year is 2024, I put esoteric use of the find command on my resume, it's 1989...

FWIW you can fix it locally and eventually use a pull request.
I don't know find well enough to comment on feasibility but I bet it'd be interesting to try, and maybe realize it's not trivial.

29 comments