ft.md

Motivation

The "usability idea" is to leverage user recall of test flags by staying as close as reasonable to that set. The only real difference is that ft {for f)ile t)ype} uses h to mean a h)ard link not an alias for -L.

Yes, there are more verbose ways to do this with man 1 find and shell for loops and more terse ways to do it with Zsh extended globbing (man 1 zshexpn).

I suspect most people are more comfortable with a shell loop that would also be portable, but OTOH, it really is a very small program.

Usage

  ft [optional-params] [paths: string...]

Batch (in both predicates & targets) test / [ .  Emit subset of paths that
pass expr.  E.g.: $(ft -eL *) =~ Zsh extended glob *(@).  Can also read stdin
as in find -type f|ft -ew. (Yes, can cobble together less tersely w/GNU find
-files0-from | find GLOB -maxdepth 0 PREDICATE.) Maybe counter-intuitively,
exit with status = match count (0=NONE).

  -f=, --file=     string  ""     optional input ( `"-"` | !tty = ``stdin`` )
  -d=, --delim=    char    '\n'   input file delimiter; `\\0` -> NUL
  -t=, --term=     char    '\n'   output path terminator
  -p=, --pattern=  string  "\$1"   emit a \$1-using pattern; E.g. "match:\$1"
  -q, --quiet      bool    false  Do not emit; Just count as exit status
  -s, --stat       bool    false  Use stat not lstat; Others say "dereference"
  -e=, --expr=     string  "e"    Concatenated extended one-letter test(1) codes
                                      e  (e)xists in any way
                                      b  is (b)lock special
                                      c  is (c)haracter special
                                      d  is a (d)irectory
                                      f  is a regular (f)ile
                                     l|L is a symbolic (l)ink; NOTE: h differs!
                                      p  is a named (p)ipe {aka FIFO}
                                      S  is a (S)ocket;CASE differs from ls/find
                                      s  has a (s)ize greater than zero
                                      h  is a (h)ard link; Link count > 1
                                      N  (N)ew; modify time > access time
                                      k  has its stic(k)y bit set
                                      u  its set-(u)ser-ID bit is set
                                      g  is set-(g)roup-ID
                                      O  is (O)wned by the effective user ID
                                      G  is owned by effective (G)roup ID
                                    r|R|A user|World|Group can (r)ead
                                    w|W|I user|World|Group can (w)rite
                                    x|X|E user|World|Group can e(x)ecute|travers
                                  In all cases a file must exist for 'true'
                                  Codes are logically ANDed; '^' prefix => NOT