Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!esquire!baumgart
From: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (Steve Baumgarten)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: System 7 question
Summary: Use DiskTop for a complex "find"
Keywords: Unix, DiskTop
Message-ID: <1700@esquire.UUCP>
Date: 2 Jan 90 17:33:22 GMT
References: <10734@claris.com> <780093@hpvcfs1.HP.COM>
Sender: news@esquire.UUCP
Reply-To: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (Steve Baumgarten)
Organization: Davis Polk & Wardwell
Lines: 58
In-reply-to: mikek@hpvcfs1.HP.COM (Mike Kirkpatrick)

In article <780093@hpvcfs1.HP.COM>, mikek@hpvcfs1 (Mike Kirkpatrick) writes:
>How about pipes and i/o redirection for starters. There are some activities
>that are just better done with a text/command line interface. The power to
>set in motion a chain of commands. Multi-directory i/o operations(especially
>disjoint directories) are much easier done with a command line. For example,
>how would you do this under macOS (send a list of all files under current
>directory to the spooled printer)?
>
>  find . -print | lp

I disagree.  Just because something has been done in a certain way for
a long time doesn't mean that it's the "best" way to do it.  Unix
utilities are a case in point.  Unix has been around for a while, and
the command-line interface has had time to mature.  Graphical user
interfaces are relatively new, and were originally designed to be
user-centered, rather than program-centered or I/O-stream-centered.

Thus, I/O redirection on the Mac is difficult *now*.  Likewise, Unix
deals best with standard input and output streams, because that's what
it was designed to do.

In any case, a command-line for the Mac is most definitely not the
answer.  No one on earth can remember all the options to the various
utilities (hence the existence of the "man" command under Unix); at
least the Commando interface under MPW is a step in the right
direction. 

But getting back to the case at hand, try DiskTop.  The new version
can do a complex find and then let you operate on the result.  For
example, I can easily have DiskTop find all the files that end in
".c", and then save the result to a file, print the file list, or copy
all but one of the files to a subdirectory, regardless of which
directories they reside in.  To do that with "find", you'd have to do
something bizarre like:

	find /source -name \*.c -print > cfiles
	{ edit "cfiles" to remove the one file you *don't* want to copy }
	cp `cat cfiles` subdir

Rather less than intuitive.  My mother is certainly never going to
learn how to do it, and why should she?  But she'd have no problem
filling in the DiskTop "find" dialog, including setting things up to
find all files that haven't been modified in a week.  Let's see, under
Unix that would be:

	find / -mtime +7 -print

Or is it:

	find / -mtime -7 -print

Better go have a look at the man page...

--
   Steve Baumgarten             | "New York... when civilization falls apart,
   Davis Polk & Wardwell        |  remember, we were way ahead of you."
   baumgart@esquire.dpw.com     | 
   cmcl2!esquire!baumgart       |                           - David Letterman