[OpenAFS] Features great and small

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Mon, 30 Jul 2001, Charles Karney wrote:

>  > > * It's frequently necessary to change the ACL on a whole directory tree and
>  > > 
>  > >     find . -noleaf -type d -print0 | xargs -0r fs sa -acl NEWACL -dir
>  > > 
>  > >   is rather a mouthful.  How about
>  > > 
>  > >     fs setacl -dir dir+ -acl acl+ -recursive [-onevolume]
>  > 
>  > is
>  > ws dirpath -d "fs sa %f system:anyuser rl someuser write"
>  > reasonable? i should see what the license on ws (walk subtree) is
> 
> Yes, this is reasonable, but having recursion be built into fs setacl would
> seem to be a bit more natural.  Also it would be nice to build some
> knowledge of volume crossing into tools like ws and find.

On the contrary, the Unix philosophy is to build complex tasks out of
small, general-purpose tools.  'find' is such a tool; it walks a directory
tree, selects only files that match specified criteria, and then performs
arbitrary actions.

If a new feature is added to 'find' (like a switch to avoid crossing AFS
mountpoints), then that feature can be used in combination with any
action.  If we put the feature into a recursive mode of 'fs sa' instead,
then it can only be used for that operation.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@cmu.edu>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA