An alarming reflex in my use of find

January 14, 2007

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.)

Written on 14 January 2007.
« Weekly spam summary on January 13th, 2007
Wrapping exceptions versus propagating them untouched »

Page tools: View Source, Add Comment.
Search:
Login: Password:
Atom Syndication: Recent Comments.

Last modified: Sun Jan 14 00:26:58 2007
This dinky wiki is brought to you by the Insane Hackers Guild, Python sub-branch.