Strange `find` syntax error in crosstool-ng

[Dave Korn]

On 28 January 2008 11:00, Michael Abbott wrote:

> On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Michael Abbott wrote:
>> My crosstool build fails with the message
>> [38:16] / find: missing argument to `-exec'
> ...
>>        find ... -name ... -exec rm -fv {} \+ ...
>> Eh?  How on earth did \; become transformed into \+?
>> 
>> The attached patch should fix this, but I haven't tested it yet.
> 
> Tested, and builds just fine now, which really begs the question: where
> did \+ come from?  According to svn those `find ... -exec rm ...` lines
> have always ended in \+ since they were introduced in revision 158 ...
> which implies that either your find accepts + as an alias for ;
> (implausible) or those lines never got exercised (also implausible).

  What version of find do you have running?  I have

/artimi/software/firmware $ find --version
GNU find version 4.3.2
Features enabled: O_NOFOLLOW(enabled) LEAF_OPTIMISATION FTS CBO(level=0)

  And in the info page I have:

8.1.4 Going back to -exec
-------------------------

There is indeed a more universal mechanism, which is a slight
modification to the `-exec' action.  The normal `-exec' action assumes
that the command to run is terminated with a semicolon (the semicolon
normally has to be quoted in order to protect it from interpretation as
the shell command separator).  The SVR4 edition of Unix introduced a
slight variation, which involves terminating the command with `+'
instead:

     find /var/tmp/stuff -mtime +90 -exec /bin/rm {} \+

   The above use of `-exec' causes `find' to build up a long command
line and then issue it.  This can be less efficient than some uses of
`xargs'; for example `xargs' allows new command lines to be built up
while the previous command is still executing, and allows you to
specify a number of commands to run in parallel.  However, the `find
... -exec ... +' construct has the advantage of wide portability.  GNU
findutils did not support `-exec ... +' until version 4.2.12; one of
the reasons for this is that it already had the `-print0' action in any
case.



    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....


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