Re: Finding shallowest instance of $foo in a given structure

[James Youngman]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 4:59 AM, RB <address@hidden> wrote:
>  I'm assuming the Texinfo page would need to be a little more
>  explanatory and should stylistically fit with section 8 or 9; is that
>  the case?

Yes.   I'd be rather in favour of 9, "Worked Examples".

>
>  Following is a patch against find.1 from findutils-4.3.13:
>
>  --- find.1.orig 2008-03-19 22:22:50.240612504 -0600
>  +++ find.1      2008-03-19 22:56:23.749388656 -0600
>  @@ -1903,6 +1903,22 @@
>   this is the default anyway, but the parentheses help to show
>   what is going on.
>
>  +.P
>  +.nf
>  +.B find repo/ \e( \-exec [ \-d {}/.svn ] \e\; \-o \-exec [ \-d
>  {}/.git ] \e\; \e) \-print \-prune
>  +
>  +.fi
>  +Search for the roots of specific SCM repositories in an efficient
>  +manner.

It might help the reader to visualise what's going on if we mention
what the approximate arrangement of the tree being searched is.

> [...] As opposed to the prior example, the parentheses play
>  +a critical role in combination with
>  +.B \-prune
>  +to prevent descent into directories that have already been
>  +discovered.  A more general way to express this behavior is
>  +"Find the shallowest instances of repeated leaf nodes in a
>  +given tree."

>    This example was derived from a need to maintain
>  +source synchronization with multiple projects that used
>  +varying SCM tools and tree management ideologies.

Not sure that last sentence adds much, even though I asked you to
indicate the motivation.

On the subject of the command itself, it's worth considering using
just one -exec per directory:
find repo/ \( -exec test -d {}/.svn -o -d {}/.git -o -d {}/CVS \; \)
-print -prune

...or descending one level further and snipping the leaf name off with -printf:
find repo/ -type d \( -name .svn -o -name .git -o -name CVS \) -printf
"%h\n" -prune