[Tfug] When RTFM is not enough

[Brian Murphy]

On Mon, Jul 08, 2002 at 12:50:54AM -0700, Bowie J. Poag wrote:
> > The solution could be a script such as this:
> 
> (..bloated perl script deleted..)
> 
> No. You need to read the manpage for du, and ls. Its clear you havent. Both
> commands are thick with formatting options, and sorting options. From there,
> its a trivial matter to parse the results with awk or grep.
> 

Ok, its shutup time.  Every command has its place.  Even though you don't
know how to use it well, find makes some tasks easy.  Suppose you want to
make a report of all setuid root or setgid group 241 files?  Don't tell me
about /usr/local, because we know it was protected at the time.  Also
include the creation and last modification dates (M D Y) in your report.

find / \( -path '/usr/local' -prune -o -perm +4000 -user root -o -perm +2000 -gid 241 \) -printf "%CB %Cd %CY\t%TB %Td %TY\t%p\n" | grep -v '\W/usr/local$'

Can you (Bowie) do it faster/more efficiently?  Assume a huge /usr/local.
Also remember, as a highly paid unix admin, we don't want you spending all
day writing some marginal, inflexible, bash/perl script.

> Yeesh.

Agreed.  Anytime you need to look at file attributes beyond the filename,
find is the best tool.  Pushing a ton of data thru a bunch of pipes is a
suboptimal solution.  This is because pipes only have a 4k buffer.  Once
the buffer fills, the writer will block.  Your pipeline will bottleneck on
the slowest reader.

Brian