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avidseeker@fosstodon.org

Avid Seeker

In Programmer's Manual (1979), the `find` manual entry has a BUGS section listing "The syntax is painful." as a bug.

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ids1024@fosstodon.org

Ian Douglas Scott

Reply to @avidseeker@fosstodon.org

@avidseeker I assume dd and find were designed by two Bell Labs employees trolling each other.

dd isn't really bad I guess. Just weird. find seems like it should be more normal, but is perpetually frustrating.

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submicron@fosstodon.org

David Thomas

Reply to @avidseeker@fosstodon.org

@avidseeker Yes. Yes, it is.

As an alternative to find(1), a lesser-known command called locate(1) was introduced in BSD Unix in the mid-80s. It uses a prebuilt, compressed database of pathnames to locate files by name.

I got familiar with it on a network of Apollo Domain/IX workstations. I set up cron jobs to run nightly searches on each host's filesystem and merge the results into a database of all the files on the LAN. That wasn't in the man page.

https://archive.org/details/login-feb83/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater

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submicron@fosstodon.org

David Thomas

Reply to @submicron@fosstodon.org

@avidseeker I also became fascinated with its use of bigrams, and I later used a bigram-frequency technique (which I learned, much later, is called "Dice's coefficient") as a fuzzy string match library, which I still carry with me from one language to another.

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jmorris

James Morris

Reply to @avidseeker@fosstodon.org
@avidseeker Try finding a file via a desktop GUI on any OS these days, "find" sucks less, IMHO.
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