[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: [gentoo-commits] gentoo-x86 commit in app-misc/note: ChangeLog note-1.3.3.ebuild

[Steve Long <slong@rathaus.eclipse.co.uk>]

Roy Marples wrote:

> On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 10:43 +0200, Fabian Groffen wrote:
>> On 15-10-2007 09:35:35 +0100, Roy Marples wrote:
>> > find "${D}" -type f -name *${v}.*pm -delete
>> 
>> Looks like you rely on your shell here to assume that you meant
>> "*${v}.*pm" because there is nothing that matches that pattern by
>> coincidence.  If it does, your find probably doesn't do what you expect
>> it to.
> 
> It was like that in the original code snippet, I assumed that is what
> the author intended? Anyway, you're probably right.
> 
Well if portability is a concern, -delete is not specified in POSIX[1]
afaict. -exec is, it turns out, including -exec blah {} + which really made
me wonder why people still have such a thing for xargs. It turns out GNU
didn't include this til recently, and it isn't in OpenBSD either for one[2]
(..disgraceful, if you ask me ;)

The unintended globbing is indeed unsafe, in the general case. I'd do this: 

find "$D" -type f -name '*'"$v"'.*pm' -exec rm {} +

The shell will still treat that all as one argument (this method is
typically used to insert variables into awk commands, or sed ones which
use ".) The + will make the command execution more efficient for commands
that take multiple filenames. The one caveat with + is that the {} must
appear at the end of the command.[3]

[1] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/find.html
[2]
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=find&apropos=0&sektion=1&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html
[3] http://wooledge.org/mywiki/UsingFind (highly recommended)


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