| I just read the original post (the store about someone writing to Dennis Ritchie) which this comment thread is about. Noticed a mention of find and cpio. So wanted to say: find, in general, is quite a powerful command [1], and one of the ways of using it, is piping its output to cpio or other commands, to act upon the found filenames (which can include relative or full paths, depending on how you call find). There is also the -exec option to find, which can do more or less what I said above (piping find's output to other commands), but without using a pipeline. Those are some good reasons why you might want to persevere and learn to use find, despite its awkward syntax. And it's not really that difficult. [1] One such example is a command I used to use a lot: some variation on piping the output of find to cpio, using the -p option of cpio (for pass, IIRC). E.g.: $ find . -name some_wildcard -print | cpio -pdmuv dirname which would copy an entire directory subtree from one place in the file system to another (or to a place (directory) in a different file system too). (Something like XCOPY ... /s /v /e in DOS.) And those cpio options could be used to do things like keeping the permissions of the target files the same as those of the source, or not, etc. Imagine how much time that could save (over having to later manually change the permissions, after the copy, particularly when there are many files). And that's just one example of the power of fin (along with other Unix commands). |