Re: find should complain more clearly on backtrack failure and abort

[James Youngman]

On 7/18/07, Coleman, Michael <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I noticed a sort of failure mode while diagnosing an odd problem with our NFS server.  
> Specifically, it looks like find is using 'open("..")' to ascend the directory tree, but 
> this may fail, in which case find seems to emit a "permission denied" and abort.
>
> I think a normal user would assume that this error message just means that the particular 
> directory cannot be visited, but that things are otherwise fine.  In fact it appears that 
> find completely gives up in this case, therefore not searching the rest of the tree (even 
> though it could in principle do so without error).  If this is so, it seems like the 
> error message should state this clearly.  For example:  "backtrack failed--find 
> aborted!" or some such, to indicate that the results of the run are fairly 
> meaningless.
>
> I didn't have time to look through the source at length, so it's possible that 
> I'm misunderstanding what's going on.


I also don't have time to consider this in detail right now, but if
you would like to log a bug at
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils, that will make sure I
don't forget it.

Thanks,
James.