The orthogonality ship has sailed with Unix, for better or (IMHO) for worse. The Unix Haters were right about this, among other things, and the sections of the handbook about the shell are still valid, even as time and Moore have rendered others quaint.
For worse, I concur. I still fire up my SGI boxes once in a while to remind myself things didn't use to/don't have to be as binary as they mostly are today (Linux vs BSD, iOS vs Android, Intel vs AMD etc.). That, and to run electropaint, of course. =)
That was already fixed with -print0 | xargs -0, but then this solution is dismissed with "The problem is that this is not a portable construct;...".
The -delete isn't either, so this is a straw man argument, although it probably is the most efficient and secure of all.
Because find changes to the directory first (carefully not following symlinks), and then deletes the file from there.
It does not delete the file using the entire path (which may contain a sudden symlink).
It's not possible to do this safely using xargs.
Take a look also at -execdir which does the same thing - changes to the directory first, and runs things from there. -exec is not safe and should not be used.
xargs is not safe if you are running against a directory not your own. You should use find and -execdir instead.
Yes, the original authors of posix made a mistake here.
> Also, rant rant, I really don't understand why find was extended with -delete in the first place.
Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan warned about this trend in their seminal paper "Program Design in the UNIX Environment" (also known as "cat -v considered harmful" which describes how proper unix programs should be designed:
