Re: Argh! Sorry for the spam...

[Brendan Byrd]

David J. MacKenzie wrote:

> I'd be inclined to use find and xargs to do selective chmodding,
> rather than adding special cases to chmod.
>
> find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod a+r

That's a bit long and overwinded for such a common operation.  After 
all, I coded the thing in because of a need.

Besides, the same argument could be applied to the recursive option. 
Why code in the "-R" option when you could just type:?

find . -print0 | xargs -0 chmod a+r

Also, the above statements wouldn't work if you didn't want to recurse 
through subdirectories.  It would be something like...I can't think of a 
equiv statement at the moment, because 'ls -1' doesn't eliminate 
files/dirs and 'find' does recursive directories only.

I can understand the need to reduce fluff/bloat in the main /bin 
commands, but I'd like to have the more common options put in there. 
The chmod command has a lot less options than most, including cp and rm.

Even with a option-bogged program like tar, everybody (including me) got 
fed up with the lack of bzip2 option, even though Linux kernels were 
being packaged with it (as is a lot of things).  I coded the option as 
-I (probably a poor choice, but I wanted to follow the system of 
retaining the same letters as "bzip2"), and now I've seen it pop up in 
other distros as both -I and others.  (I've seen "-y", and my current 
one uses "-j".  I like "-y" the best, but I don't even know what's in 
the official GNU distro.)

Anyway, my two cents...

--
Brendan Byrd (address@hidden)
System Administrator @ Mission Data
http://www.missiondata.com/