Sat 05 May 2007 10:33:37 AM UTC, comment #2:
I've decided not to implement this.
The current behaviour is easy to explain and complies with POSIX. The proposed bahviour may or may not be POSIX compliant, is somewhat trickier to explain, and probably makes a lot of things more ambiguous.
For example, this query would print the names of files we can't stat, but the "-size" test would need to fail (since we do not know the size).
find -type u -print -size 3 [more predicates]
However, consider this alternative query:
find -type u -print ! -size 3 [more predicates]
Here, "! -size 3" would also have to fail, because we cannot be sure that the file we cannot stat does not have a size of 3.
This means that instead of predicates returning true/false valus, they would all need to be able to return Tuue vs. False vs. Indeterminate.
That would add a lot of complexity, and I don't believe the benefit justifies the additional complexity.
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