You know, this many flavors of unix thing sucks. -printf is not an option on my find. There is -print and -print0 but no -printf

Your find sucks. That option is in GNU find 4.1 of November 1994. Try it on the Redhat box? What does "find --version" say?

The standalone printf command doesn't stand a chance of doing the right thing as it doesn't have all the information that find does.

Peter