Re: [bug #46815] problem when testing file size

[James Youngman]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 7:23 PM, Bernhard Voelker
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On 01/09/2016 04:41 PM, James Youngman wrote:
>> Let's re-open the discussion about what to call the "sane" alternative to
>> -size, and implement it this time.
>
> I'm not so enthusiastic,
[...]
> I'd rather suggest to re-work the --help output to explain every single
> option rather than just mentioning them as today.  The usage text via --help
> is the first thing a user tries to read when {s,}he's unsure.  With the
> longer format, we'd have the chance to avoid confusion at the first place
> the user is looking for.
> And IMHO using a text based on that of the POSIX spec for the -size option
> would be the best I could think of.

Suppose someone wants to find files smaller than 20MiB.  Are you sure
that the best answer we should give them is that they should use
"find -size -20971520c"?

(My first draft at illustrating the problem was with GiB, but I used
units(1) to do the conversion and it came up with a floating-point
number, which kind of illustrates the fact that this is all quite
inconvenient for the user).

James.