Strange `find` syntax error in crosstool-ng

[Michael Abbott]

On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Dave Korn wrote:
>  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)

I have

$ find --version
GNU find version 4.1.20
$ cat /etc/issue
Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 4 (Nahant Update 6)
Kernel \r on an \m

$

I guess RH enterprise 4 is too ancient to know about the + feature; have 
to confess it's news to me too!

>  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.

Odd language there: "the ... + construct has the advantage of wide 
portability ... [it was] not support[ed] until version 4.2.12".  Perhaps 
they meant to say "does not have" instead of "has"?

Ah well: that explains my confusion, makes more sense.

I guess either the ./configure script needs to detect this, or we could 
just use the \; terminator, as actually we don't really need xargs like 
behaviour for rm!  (This step runs briskly enough anyway.)

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