Re: Interaction between -o and the default-print

[James Youngman]

On Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 12:53:49PM +0100, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> On 2004-11-01 James Youngman <address@hidden> wrote:
> [...]
> > $ find . -ls -mindepth 3  >/dev/null
> > find: warning: you have specified the -mindepth option after a non-option 
> > argument -ls, but options are not positional (-mindepth affects tests 
> > specified before it as well as those specified after it).  Please specify 
> > options before other arguments.
> [...]
> > I do wonder though if this attempt to be helpful will simply be
> > irritating.  However, there are a couple of defect reports that have
> > been raised which would have been avoided if this error message had
> > been implemented.   Some people do seem to assume that things like 
> 
> >  find . \( -name foo -print \) -o \( -mindepth 2 -type d -print \) 
> 
> > will work, and print out instances of "foo" which are in the current
> > directory.
> 
> Hello,
> While both is true I currently tend to "a lot more irritating than
> useful".
> 
> find is used in countless scripts including lots of cronjobs and I
> suspect lots of them would trigger this warning (Resulting in
> a useless mail for every cronjob). (And yes I've already found a
> instance after a single day.)
> 
> How about a -debug and asking people to use it before submitting a
> bugreport?

I agree with the idea, though I might call the option -warn/-nowarn,
with the default being -nowarn, unless stdin is a tty.  Thoughts?