This package contains the GNU find, xargs, and locate programs. find and xargs comply with POSIX 1003.2, as far as I know (with the exception of the "+" modifier for the "-exec" action, which isn't implemented yet). They also support a large number of additional options, some borrowed from Unix and some unique to GNU. See the file NEWS for a list of major changes in the current release. See the file INSTALL for compilation and installation instructions. To verify the GPG signature of the release, you will need the public key of the findutils maintainer. You can download this from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg. Alternatively, you could query a PGP keyserver, but you will need to use one that can cope with subkeys containing photos. Many older key servers cannot do this. I use subkeys.pgp.net. I think that one works. See also the "Downloading" section of http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/. Special configure options: --with-afs Make find support "-fstype afs". Requires /afs, /usr/afsws/lib, and /usr/afsws/include. configure doesn't add AFS support automatically because it adds considerably to find's size, and the AFS libraries need -lucb on Solaris, which breaks find. --enable-id-cache Make tables of used UIDs and GIDs at startup instead of using getpwuid or getgrgid when needed. Speeds up -nouser and -nogroup unless you are running NIS or Hesiod, which make password and group calls very expensive. --enable-debug Produce output on the standard error output indicating what find is doing. This information includes details about how the command line has been parsed and what files have been stat()ed. This output is normally interesting only to the maintainer, and so is off by default. DEFAULT_ARG_SIZE=<value> If this environment variable is defined to a numeric expression during configure, it determines the default argument size limits used by xargs without -s, and by find, when spawning child processes. Otherwise, the default is set at 128 kibibytes. If the system cannot support the default limit, the system's limit will be used instead. To gain speed, GNU find avoids statting files whenever possible. It does this by: 1. Checking the number of links to directories and not statting files that it knows aren't directories until it encounters a test or action that needs the stat info. 2. Rearranging the command line, where possible, so that it can do tests that don't require a stat before tests that do, in hopes that the latter will be skipped because of an OR or AND. (But it only does this where it will leave the output unchanged.) The locate program and its helper programs are derived (heavily modified) from James Woods' public domain fast-find code, which is also distributed with the 4.3BSD find. Because POSIX.2 requires `find foo' to have the same effect as `find foo -print', the fast-find searching has been moved to a separate program, `locate'; the same thing has been done in 4.4BSD. If you use locate, you should run the included `updatedb' script from cron periodically (typically nightly). Mail suggestions and bug reports for these programs to bug-findutils@gnu.org.
