It looks like my "patches" didn't get included. I've just submitted a real patch for the manual entry and the texi file via git send-email.

Another (unrelated) problem with this example is that it is supposed to be "an efficient search for the projects' roots", but it's not efficient (apart from the pruning). It invokes up to three test processes for every candidate file. It only needs to invoke a single test process (that checks for all three SCM sub-directories), and it only needs to do that for candidates that are actually directories. It's doing it for everything. That's a lot of unnecessary processes.

I suggest replacing this:

    $ find repo/ \
        \( -exec test -d '{}/.svn' \; \
        -or -exec test -d '{}/.git' \; \
        -or -exec test -d '{}/CVS' \; \
        \) -print -prune

with this:

    $ find repo \
        -type d \
        -exec test -d '{}/.svn' -o -e '{}/.git' -o -d '{}/CVS' \; \
        -print -prune

Bonus: The -e for {}/.git rather than -d is because .git can be a file that refers to a directory somewhere else.

In the find(1) manual entry, there is this example:

Given the following directory of projects and their associated   SCM administrative directories, perform an efficient search for the projects' roots:

    $ find repo/ \
        \( -exec test -d '{}/.svn' \; \
        -or -exec test -d '{}/.git' \; \
        -or -exec test -d '{}/CVS' \; \
        \) -print -prune

Sample output:

    repo/project1/CVS
    repo/gnu/project2/.svn
    repo/gnu/project3/.svn
    repo/gnu/project3/src/.svn
    repo/project4/.git

But the above sample output is very wrong. If the directories listed above existed, then the output would be:

  repo/project1
  repo/gnu/project2
  repo/gnu/project3
  repo/project4

(but not necessarily in that order).

The "/CVS" and "/.svn" and "/.git" sub-directories would not be included in the output because they don't match the query. It is their parent directories that match the query.

More importantly, the "repo/gnu/project3/src" directory would not appear because of the use of -prune which excludes anything under "repo/gnu/project3". That's the whole point of this example. It prunes the tree wherever it finds an SCM directory (so it excludes nested project roots).

It looks like the "Sample output" should really have been listed under "Given the following directory of projects", and the "Sample output" should have been completely different.

This example should probably be rewritten to look like this:

Given the following directory of projects and their associated   SCM administrative directories, perform an efficient search for the projects' roots:

    $ find repo/ \
        \( -exec test -d '{}/.svn' \; \
        -or -exec test -d '{}/.git' \; \
        -or -exec test -d '{}/CVS' \; \
        \) -print -prune

Sample directories:

    repo/project1/CVS
    repo/gnu/project2/.svn
    repo/gnu/project3/.svn
    repo/gnu/project3/src/.svn
    repo/project4/.git

Sample output:

    repo/project1
    repo/gnu/project2
    repo/gnu/project3
    repo/project4