Follow-up Comment #12, bug #60383 (project findutils):
Thanks for the feedback and for testing some use cases.
Well, I decided to go the defensive way first because it's always
easier to extend functionality than to remove later.
My thought was that with the regular invocation without a starting point,
find(1) would implicitly assume '.' as the starting point.
In the -files0-from mode, doing the same would feel strange.
Therefore, outputting an error seemed the natural choice.
Of course, your request makes sense, but I wonder what would be
the best way to do it.
As you're mentioning the behavior of xargs(1), there seem 3 alternatives:
a) change -files0-from to silently ignore an empty file.
b) add an extra option like -ignore-files0-empty to tweak the behavior
of the -files0-from option to ignore an empty input file.
c) add a sister option like -files0-from-ignore-empty (the name is too
long, of course; it's to demonstrate).
Another choice could be the combination of a) and b), i.e., one would
need an additional option to get an error for an empty input file.
I have no strong preference, clearly a) is the easiest.
Any thoughts?
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