Re: Request for enhancements to find

[James Youngman]

On Oct 20, 2007 1:08 AM, Wayne Pollock <address@hidden> wrote:
> For -perm:
>   You can't easily find files with odd combinations of
>   permissions, such as files with more access for group
>   members than the owner/user, or more for others than
>   for group members.

True.   I would suggest that you use a scripting language such as
Perl, Python, etc. for this.   This also allows you to check other
things too.   The machine I am writing this on has about a million
files on it.  You might find it efficient to do one pass with find and
analyse the data after the fact.

>   I would like to see the syntax extended to allow something
>   like:
>     -perm -u-r,g=r -o -perm -g-r,o=r
>   Currently I don't believe find allows 'u-r".

It's allowed and has the POSIX required semantics I think (that is, no
effect in this case I think).   Perhaps you meant

 \! -perm -u+r

> I think this
>   should be allowed, with the meaning of "-perm -u-r,g=r"
>   to be "user read is off, group read is on, other permission
>   bits can be anything".

I think that would be "-perm -g+r \! -perm -u+r".

> For time comparisons:
>   To check for files with invalid, future dates, you must
>   currently create a file first, then use "-newer", then
>   delete the file.
>   This doesn't work well in this case, as you can only test
>   the mtime of the files.  One possible fix would be to add
>   -anewer and -cnewer (and maybe -mnewer, for completeness).
>
>   However when searching a large filesystem for such files,
>   find many take several seconds or minutes.  Thus this test
>   shows many false positives (all files modified since the
>   temp file was created).
>
>   I would like to have a way to compare a file with the current
>   time.  I don't know the best way to allow this, perhaps a
>   special string "NOW" in place of the filename, or perhaps
>   a new test -future or -newernow  or even -badtimestamp?

Why not just use -newermt (findutils 4.3.2+)?

James.