find with -delete option on absolute paths

Matt Tagg wamatt at gmail.com
Wed Mar 11 03:32:34 UTC 2015


Hey BSD folks

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 at 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 at 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?

Thanks
- m


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