2007-01-14
An alarming reflex in my use of find
It makes me nervous that my fingers appear to feel that the right
thing to type after 'find . type f -print |' is 'xargs rm -f'.
Sometimes they're quite insistent about it.
I am not sure where this reflex comes from, because I don't think
I've done that particular operation that many times. It certainly
makes typing 'for all files' find operations a twitchy exercise, and
I get to worry that someday I will, eg, accidentally delete all of
WanderingThoughts instead of counting how many entries it has.
(Possibly I should deal with this by putting the find bit into a
script I call allfiles or something, so I wouldn't be typing something
that cues my reflexes. On the other hand, this is a reflex I should
probably stamp out as fast as possible, so maybe I shouldn't.)