Page modification request: find

[zmajeed]

Command description

Two find examples are wrong or misleading

1. The use of globstar ** below is misleading

• Find files matching multiple path/name patterns:
  find {{root_path}} -path '{{**/path/**/*.ext}}' -or -name '{{*pattern*}}'

find does not support globstar - it uses fnmatch() for glob patterns which doesn't recognize globstar syntax - find does not set the FNM_PATHNAME flag for fnmatch() - this means a single star * matches anything including slash in paths and two consecutive stars are effectively redundant

The example should be

• Find files matching multiple path/name patterns:
  find {{root_path}} -path '{{*/path/*/*.ext}}' -or -name '{{*pattern*}}'

2. The following example has wrong syntax - it uses pipe | instead of comma , to match multiple types - also pipe is not escaped for the shell which interprets the command as a pipeline and would be an error or cause unexpected results

• Find empty files (0 byte) or directories and delete them verbosely:
  find {{root_path}} -type {{f|d}} -empty -delete -print

From https://manned.org/man/find

-type c
              File is of type c:

              To search for more than one type at once, you can supply the
              combined list of type letters separated by a comma `,' (GNU
              extension).

The example should be

• Find empty files (0 byte) or directories and delete them verbosely:
  find {{root_path}} -type '{{f,d}}' -empty -delete -print

Command details

No response

Documentation

https://manned.org/man/find

Platform

Linux

VCS repository link (e.g. GitHub, GitLab)

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/findutils.git

Additional information

No response

[gutjuri]

The following example has wrong syntax - it uses pipe | instead of comma , to match multiple types - also pipe is not escaped for the shell which interprets the command as a pipeline and would be an error or cause unexpected results

The | is tldr-syntax (see styleguide). It is used when there is a fixed number of possible values that can be used in an argument.

[zmajeed]

Not sure I follow ... Are you saying the find commandline example is not meant to be run as-is?

[zmajeed]

If the pipe is meant to say -type only takes f or d then that's misleading because it can take a few other letters - and with the comma , separator it can take multiple letters at the same time

[gutjuri]

Not sure I follow ... Are you saying the find commandline example is not meant to be run as-is?

No, the examples are generally meant to be modified before running. E.g. we have this example

tldr/pages/common/7z.md

Line 28 in 9a51987

`7z a -t{{7z|bzip2|gzip|lzip|tar|zip}} {{path/to/archive}} {{path/to/file_or_directory}}`

which includes some possible options that can be passed to 7zip.

However, I think that you are right that in this particular case, the example is misleading, especially with the wording of the description. So yes, we should probably change it.