Shell Programming and Scripting

In this case, the only diff it would make is when you append > /dev/null to the end of your find stmt.. Tell me if Im wrong now..

u-pl27:~/ZKOUSKOVE/TEZSI_PRIKLADY$ find ~/ZKOUSKOVE/CVS -type f -print | xargs grep -i '.cvs' >/dev/null
u-pl27:~/ZKOUSKOVE/TEZSI_PRIKLADY$ find ~/ZKOUSKOVE/CVS -type f | xargs grep -i '.cvs' >/dev/null

So that output is <nothing> in both cases :-[

I see that being oblique is confusing you. YOU DO NOT NEED TO USE -print.
The man page is confusing. Here is a more detailed answer.

There are standards for UNIX utilities - POSIX is the name used. From POSIX

Code:

STDOUT
The -print primary shall cause the current pathnames to be written to standard output. The format shall be:

"%s\n", <path>

The "funny" thing is that the standards do not say explicitly what happens to output if -print is omitted.

This means - Developer at company A is a nice guy. So he puts a printf() statement in his C code. Why? Because what use is find without output?

Meanwhile the Developer for Company B decides to follow the implicit standard: no -print equals no output.

This means that if you use find on one machine you get a situation where -print is required, but on another machine from another company (different UNIX tools) -print IS required.

I haven't seen the B version for long time, So I don't know which versions of find, if any, do the "B" thing.

With GNU tools you have to aware that they sometimes do not follow POSIX, or expand the functionality a lot. The GNU date command is like that. You have to know what OS a poster has before you can recommend something that may be part of GNU find but is not a POSIX thing - because it will not work on a non-GNU version.

Clearer?

absolutely, thank you!
(I'm sorry but it's part of my personality I always want to know how things exactly work O:-) )

I recall actually using a platform where find did nothing (i.e. nothing useful in the very simplest usage scenario; your speculations about when omitting it might be useful are pretty clueful!) if you didn't include the -print -- unfortunately my memory is hazy, probably SunOS or OSF/1.

Sometimes you may need to write a code like this:

Code:

% find
.
./unwanted_dir
./unwanted_dir/unwanted_file
./wanted_dir
./wanted_dir/wanted_file
% find -name unwanted_dir -prune -o -print
.
./wanted_dir
./wanted_dir/wanted_file

Originally, find would produce no output unless you told it to with -print. This was a source of confusion for newbies, so when posix came out, it specified that the -print was assumed. (Didn't help much with the confusion, did it?) Now you only need -print in relatively complex commands.