Re: Inconsistent behavior of core utilities

[Michael Stone]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 10:10:46PM -0700, L A Walsh wrote:
> > there's more to life than coreutils
> -----
> But the OP was posting about inconsistencies in coreutils.
>
> What you are saying is because coreutils is broken/inconsistent, use 
> 'find'.

For programmatic use, definitely. When someone's trying to pound a 
square peg into a round hole it's rarely helpful for them to make one 
corner a little rounder (for their particular definition of "more 
round") because it's still going to be a peg that's the wrong shape.

> find isn't consistent.  If you specify '.' as a starting dir, all output is 
> prefixed with
> './'
>
> If you leave off the starting dir you still get './' as a prefix instead of a 
> null prefix.
>
> Even if you try a null dir as a starting point '', you still can't get 
> your listing without './' prepended.

sounds extremely consistent to me. there is no "null prefix"; per the 
docs, if no starting point is specified then . is assumed.

also, find /dir -type f -printf '%f\n'

find is intended for programmatic use, so its output can be tailored to 
meet particular requirements. I suspect the above still isn't the best 
answer unless the requirement is actually "print filenames without 
directories" but it does what it says.