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To: Matt Tagg <wamatt@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: find with -delete option on absolute paths
From: "Julian H. Stacey" <jhs@berklix.com>
Organization: http://berklix.com BSD Unix Linux Consultants, Munich Germany
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In-reply-to: Your message "Tue, 10 Mar 2015 20:31:52 -0700."
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Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:54:38 +0100
Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
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Matt Tagg wrote:
> Hey BSD folks
> 
> I believe this was discussed previously (2013), though I could not
> find a resolution.
> 
> To recap, suppose we try deleting files on an absolute path:
> 
> matt@mtbook:/% find /tmp/foo/* -delete
> find: -delete: /tmp/foo/bar.txt: relative path potentially not safe
> 
> As you can see it gives an error and quits. However if we instead try this:
> 
> matt@mtbook:/% gfind /tmp/foo/* -delete
> 
> GNU Find throws no error and works as expected ('bar.txt is deleted')
> 
> So as an end user, I find this rather confusing. How can I get the
> same behavior with BSD Find out of the box?

Off on a tangent:
Last millenia (1987 :-) when I was using find & needed an rm to reduce
near duplicate trees on DOS & Unix, I wrote my own C
	http://berklix.com/~jhs/src/bsd/jhs/bin/public/cmpd/
I've never since worried about getting syntax of test conditions
wrong & deleting good stuff by mistake.

Cheers,
Julian
--
Julian Stacey, BSD Linux Unix C Sys Eng Consultant Munich http://berklix.com
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