On 11/21/2013 10:38 AM, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 11/21/2013 10:35 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> as I don't see it as specific to rm.
>> I.E. other tools like chmod etc would have the same requirement,
>> and they might be handled with various shell globbing constructs.
>> Even more generally find(1) could be used to handle arbitrarily
>> many files and commands that don't support recursion internally.
>>
>> Could you explain why rm would get this and say chmod would not?
> 
> Ideally, any command that implements recursion should have the option to
> operate on children only.  You are correct that rm should not be special
> in this regards, so yes, I think chmod should also get it.

Which says that maybe gnulib's fts module needs a new flag for recursion
without visiting the root node, rather than adding ad-hoc root node
exclusion into all clients.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org