Shell Programming and Scripting

I think that was the point I was making earlier. Because of the 1990's divergence of the extant unix flavors, I don't see that knowing linux find semantics cold (or any other find implementation) is any sort of guarantee that a given semantic nuance will carry over somewhere else.

I still post ll instead of ls -l because I learned it first. Long ago. A lot of unixes do not have ll natively.

@methyl: I still believe this is not technically possible but the details you are providing are interesting.

One of the reasons I was denying any possibility for the quotes to be useful is that all know shells are removing them before passing them to the find command. This is defeating any usefulness with embedded spaces in filenames as there aren't spaces yet when the command is called. As you are telling this was occurring in a crontab context, it might be possible that an exotic/early cron implementation by DRS/NX would have not used a shell to interpret the command line but simply execute the line as is. I'm not aware of such weird implementation but I'm open to that possibility. In that case, and only in that one, the single quotes would have been received by the find command. Another hurdle is that, as far as I remember, System V find (DRS/NX was SVR2/3/4 based) was only expanding the curly braces when alone as argument but that wouldn't be the case when the quotes are passed untouched. Let's assume this second objection is false because of a specific customization. All find and rm implementations are properly handling their arguments so do not need quotes anyway. The only reason where these surviving quotes would have had an effect would have been a "rm" wrapper that wouldn't properly expands its arguments, like:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
# broken rm implementation
/bin/rm $*

That's a lot of oddities for a single system ...

About experience as you are asking, in the last 26 years I have been working in various expertise positions (support, training, development, consultancy) with many Unix releases including Unix version 7 (TNIX), 4.2BSD (Utek), Minix, Ultrix, HP-UX, DG-UX, AIX, SVR3 (Utek V), Xenix, SCO, OSF/1, IRIX, SunOS 4 and 5 (Solaris) all versions and Gnu/Linux most mainstream distributions.

Of course, none of these did/do exhibit in their standard configuration the '{}' feature you are supporting.