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Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2015 21:36:45 +0100
From: Jilles Tjoelker <jilles@stack.nl>
To: Matt Tagg <wamatt@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: find with -delete option on absolute paths
Message-ID: <20150311203645.GA30268@stack.nl>
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On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 08:31:52PM -0700, Matt Tagg wrote:
> I believe this was discussed previously (2013), though I could not
> find a resolution.

> To recap, suppose we try deleting files on an absolute path:

> matt@mtbook:/% find /tmp/foo/* -delete
> find: -delete: /tmp/foo/bar.txt: relative path potentially not safe

> As you can see it gives an error and quits. However if we instead try this:

> matt@mtbook:/% gfind /tmp/foo/* -delete

> GNU Find throws no error and works as expected ('bar.txt is deleted')

> So as an end user, I find this rather confusing. How can I get the
> same behavior with BSD Find out of the box?

You can get the same behaviour by upgrading to FreeBSD 10 or newer.

Before FreeBSD 10.0, find -delete did not allow deleting files given as
arguments. This was because of an incorrect check and was fixed in
SVN r253886.

-- 
Jilles Tjoelker