[ILUG] cron strangeness

[Niall O Broin]

On 19 Aug 2006, at 16:54, Badger wrote:

> One wild idea - it's an issue with find. It's quite strange, and I  
> don't
> understand the reason for it (yet). but look what happens when you
> happens when you make a directory and then remove it with 'find - 
> exec':
>
> $ mkdir testdir
> $ ls
> testdir
> $ find . -name testdir -exec rm -fr "{}" \;
> find: ./testdir: No such file or directory
> $ ls
> $
>
> Strange stuff - it works but pretends not to.

It does work, and it doesn't pretend not to. A couple of minutes with  
strace and the penny dropped. testdir is a directory, so find tries  
to descend it after the exec action has been performed on it - but as  
the exec action was to REMOVE the directory, find of course can't  
descend it. Doh!



Niall