Re: find -ok ... and reading from stdin

[Russell Shaw]

James Youngman wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 11:37:19AM +1000, Russell Shaw wrote:
>
> > I haven't used the -ok feature, so this is only my guess of what
> > should happen.
> >
> > If find is fed with a pipe for stdin, questions asked by -ok should
> > open a new file descriptor for the controlling tty. If the process
> > group is in a session that has no controlling tty, then find should
> > block or exit on a TTIN/TTOU signal.
>
> This is an interesting idea and straightforward to implement.  Is
> there a consensus in favour of this?
>
> > It would save scripts being accidently run by batch jobs that would
> > normally ask questions about doing large deletions. If the user
> > intended that, they should edit out the -ok command. 
>
> Indeed.
>
> > The other way is to have an extra option that tells find to assume
> > yes or no for -ok when run without access to a controlling
> > tty. Maybe -nok for assume "no" and -yok to assume "yes".
>
> Well, -yok would just be -exec and -nok would just be -false (with the
> arguments removed).

I was just thinking of scripts that would be dual use so that they can
be run interactively as well as in sessions with no tty. I don't know if
it would be used much in practice.