Re: Problems building coreutils HEAD against gnulib HEAD

[Eric Blake]

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According to Andreas Schwab on 2/19/2008 2:32 PM:
|> Under the influence of -L, does -xtype l work like -lname '*' in
|> detecting just the broken symlinks?
|
| You don't use -L of course (it isn't supported by find 4.1 anyway).
| Note that with -L you would risk walking out of the base directory.

POSIX requires "find -L . -type l" to print all broken symlinks, but has
the drawback, as you mention, of following symlinks into other
directories, as well as the drawback that not all finds are
POSIX-compliant (Solaris 8 find, for example, does not understand -L).
POSIX also requires "-exec ... {} +" to work, but not all finds support
that (and since you seem to be stuck on the ancient GNU find 4.1, that is
one of the programs that lacks it).  Without "-exec ... {} +", you run the
risk of a poorly named symlink containing metacharacters which won't work
nicely with xargs, or you suffer a slowdown of "-exec ... {} \;", or you
fall back to extensions like -print0.

Everything else mentioned in this thread (-xtype, -delete, -lname,
- -print0) is a GNU extension; and while BSD find has some of the same
extensions, it does not have them all.  And Solaris find is just too poor
in features to find broken symlinks in the first place.  So once you
assume GNU find, you might as well assume it in multiple aspects.  I'll
leave it up to Jim what to put in the bootstrap script.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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