All the time arguments and size parameters and rules about depth and boolean syntax and the print0 for pipeline integration ... it makes me long for DOS interfaces from the 80s. There has to be a way to do it with less intellectual lifting every time.
Maybe just a simple set of bash reads will help - that's how I do ssh port forwarding - I was tired of getting confused.
Integration with /etc/mime would be nice as well so I can just search for, say, "image" or "video". (This would be at the frontend in this (currently) fictional helper script)
The existence of things like `-print0` is the downside of Unix's "all files/pipes are byte streams" design decision.
The IBM mainframe implementation of the pipeline idea – CMS Pipelines [0] – makes pipes record-based instead. Since the pipes are not streams of bytes, rather records with out-of-band boundaries, there is no need to reserve a special character (whether LF or NUL) to serve as a record separator.
> Integration with /etc/mime would be nice as well so I can just search for, say, "image" or "video"
It is a pity that Unix never had a "file type" field in the filesystem, unlike classic MacOS, Acorn RISC OS, among others. I suppose both those systems had the limitation that the file type was just a number, subsequent experience has demonstrated it needs to be a much longer string (such as a MIME type or Apple UTI). The problem with file extensions is the same extension ends up being used by completely unrelated applications for completely unrelated file formats – e.g. nowadays .doc is normally assumed to be legacy binary Microsoft Word, but many older archives it is a plain text file instead, or sometimes even some other word processing format.
All the time arguments and size parameters and rules about depth and boolean syntax and the print0 for pipeline integration ... it makes me long for DOS interfaces from the 80s. There has to be a way to do it with less intellectual lifting every time.
Maybe just a simple set of bash reads will help - that's how I do ssh port forwarding - I was tired of getting confused.
Integration with /etc/mime would be nice as well so I can just search for, say, "image" or "video". (This would be at the frontend in this (currently) fictional helper script)