Re: Possibly Off Topic Rant

[Mike Frysinger]

On Monday 02 March 2009 00:22:15 Ray Parrish wrote:
> but it would be nice if the man pages would at least mention things like
> "this parameter has to be quoted to work" or use a * on the end of the
> path to activate the --recursive option. It took me hours to find that
> out with the ls command, see following output.

the shell expanding * has nothing to do with any specific command.  like Chet 
said, that's a basic premise of using a *nix system that any half decent book 
out there would cover.

> And as another note, even 'though I've used the -d switch to show only
> directories in the output I'm still getting filenames with it. I also
> expected the command to keep recursing into the subdirectories of /proc/
> and list the directories there, but no such luck. What gives? Here's
> what the man page says -

this is the "bash" list, not coreutils (which owns the "ls" program).  if you 
want clearer info there, talk to them.

> And you wouldn't believe the amount of time it took me to formulate the
> following command to get what I wanted.
>
> find -maxdepth 1 -printf '%f %T+\n' | sort -s -t ' ' -k 2.1nr -k 2.6n -k
> 2.9n -k 2.12r -k 2.15 -k 2.18
>
>  From the find man page below you will note that it doesn't mention the
> fact that the printf parameters need to be quoted to work.

yet another basic issue not specific to any command.  reading a book would 
address this.

> And here is the skimpy info in the sort man page for the -k parameter. -

sort is from coreutils, not bash.
-mike

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