[bug #31005] -exec {} + and -execdir {} + are always true (but documentation does not say so)

[Aaron D. Ball]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?31005>

                 Summary: -exec {} + and -execdir {} + are always true (but
documentation does not say so)
                 Project: findutils
            Submitted by: adb
            Submitted on: Thu 09 Sep 2010 06:47:42 PM EDT
                Category: find
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Wrong result
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
         Originator Name: 
        Originator Email: 
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                 Release: 4.4.2
           Fixed Release: None

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Details:

A naive user (e.g., I until a few minutes ago) would expect both of these
commands

   find -exec false \; -o -print
   find -exec false '{}' \+ -o -print

to print all the files in the directory tree.  Instead, the former prints
everything and the latter prints nothing:  i.e., the multi-argument form of
"-exec" always returns true.

Since the documentation doesn't say anything about the truth values differing
between the two forms of the statement, it seems natural to expect that, if
-exec foo {} + invokes

   foo file1 file2 ...

then the truth value at each file used in the invocation would be equal to
the truth value of the whole invocation.

After thinking about it a little while, I see that we might need the truth
value for file1 before we can decide whether to feed file2 to the command, so
there may not be a logical way to fix this.  In any case, the documentation
should accurately describe the behavior of the '+' variant of the commands.

(In my own selfish interest, I should point out that the way I'm using this
feature would actually work fine if the truth value were always "true" for
every file but the last one in a command invocation, which *is* logically
possible to implement.)





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