Re: CVS commit: src/usr.bin/find

[Christoph Badura <bad%bsd.de@localhost>]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 05:11:38PM -0500, James Chacon wrote:
> Not necessarily stripping them off in the path lookup routines, but when
> it prints back out the results.
> 
> i.e. find /etc/
> /etc/motd
> Looks a whole lot better than
> /etc//motd

So, what if I used, say,  "/etc//" on purpose so that the output is easier
to process with a program?

Having programs second guess the users intentions instead of doing exactly
what it has been told has a history of not getting it right since the beginning
of computing science.  So why bother?  One of the reasons I've put up with
Unix the last 25 years was that it did't try to be "helpful" and instead
tried to do exactly what it was told -- nothing more, nothing less.

I find it disturbing that we are changing programs to be "helpful" for
purely cosmetic reasons.