Re: FAQ update suggestion for "I'm having basic problems with find. Why?"

[Larry Hall <cygwin-lh at cygwin dot com>]

At 10:02 AM 7/8/2004, you wrote:
>I have been using *ixy-type systems on and off for what must now be 16 years, including using "find".
>
>I was using "find" today on an UDF/ISO format DVD-R, and was perplexed by it seemingly missing out large chunks of the hierarchy at random.
>
>It seems that "find" has an optimisation relating to the hard link count on directories and the presence or otherwise of the "." and ".." objects.
>
>If the filesystem you are finding on doesn't have the "." and ".." objects then "find" will fail silently(!)
>
>To get it to work, you need to turn the optimisation off with the "-noleaf" option.
>
>This is documented in the man page, but when you come to the symptoms cold, it looks more like a subsystem issue than an application issue, so it didn't occur to me to look in the documentation for "find".
>
>The problem here is that the route to discovery of the solution is somewhat tricky.
>
>(In fact you could say that it is a dangerous optimisation in find.  If the optimisation is not valid, there are no error messages and it fails silently.  I guess I should be looking to see if this issue has already come up on the upstream version of find.)


Right.  I'd agree with this notion.


>My point is this:
>
>Whilst this is not an issue with Cygwin per se, the nature of Cygwin means that this issue will tend to arise commonly with Cygwin, and tend not to arise under traditional unixes.


Why's that?


>Perhaps it would be a good idea to mention this issue in the Cygwin FAQ?
>
>Possibly as a second point under the existing heading of 
>"I'm having basic problems with find. Why?"
>
>We could have an extra paragraph that goes something like this:
>
>If find does not seem to be producing enough results, or seems to be missing out some directories, you may be experiencing a problem with one of find's optimisations.  See the documentation for the option '-noleaf' in the man page.
>


That seems to be reasonable wording.  But my inclination would be to get
the results of more research into the 'find' issue before adding this to the 
Cygwin doc somewhere (not sure if the FAQ is quite the right spot given that
we haven't seen allot of questions about it - at least not yet ;-) ).  Would
you be able to look into this further?


--
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
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