Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!cme!cam!coleman
From: coleman@cam.nist.gov (5672)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Descending directory hierarchy?
Summary: ftw(3)
Keywords: directory list find search
Message-ID: <1810@gamma.cam.nist.gov>
Date: 1 Dec 89 16:56:59 GMT
References: <1372@lakesys.lakesys.com>
Distribution: usa
Organization: National Institute of Standards & Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
Lines: 18

In article <1372@lakesys.lakesys.com>, johnb@lakesys.lakesys.com (John C. Burant) writes:
> I've been thinking about the find command on SysV's... the one that makes you
> type find / name [filename] -print to find files, and only finds files with
> the exact filename specified... and I've been thinking about writing a program
> that will act like the BSD find... it list all files with the phrase you look
> for in the filename... (like if I looked for t, I'd get a lot of files listed)
> 
> Which brings me to the question: Is there a way to descend the directory 
> hierachy into every directory, or do I have to write a routine to do that?

I suggest the use of the library function ftw(3). Their is one bug
that I encountered on the SUN running bsd 4.3. ftw(3) won't handle
symbolic links so I had to prepare a version on ftw() that does. You
may not have any problems with it if you don't have symbolics links.

Sean Coleman
NIST
coleman@bldr.nist.gov