I am having a hard time getting find to look for matches in the current directory as well as its subdirectories.
When I run find *test.c
it only gives me the matches in the current directory. (does not look in subdirectories)
If I try find . -name *test.c
I would expect the same results, but instead it gives me only matches that are in a subdirectory. When there are files that should match in the working directory, it gives me: find: paths must precede expression: mytest.c
What does this error mean, and how can I get the matches from both the current directory and its subdirectories?
From find manual:
NON-BUGS
Operator precedence surprises
The command find . -name afile -o -name bfile -print will never print
afile because this is actually equivalent to find . -name afile -o \(
-name bfile -a -print \). Remember that the precedence of -a is
higher than that of -o and when there is no operator specified
between tests, -a is assumed.
“paths must precede expression” error message
$ find . -name *.c -print
find: paths must precede expression
Usage: find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-Olevel] [-D ... [path...] [expression]
This happens because *.c has been expanded by the shell resulting in
find actually receiving a command line like this:
find . -name frcode.c locate.c word_io.c -print
That command is of course not going to work. Instead of doing things
this way, you should enclose the pattern in quotes or escape the
wildcard:
$ find . -name '*.c' -print
$ find . -name \*.c -print
In my case i was missing trailing /
in path.
find /var/opt/gitlab/backups/ -name *.tar
I came across this question when I was trying to find multiple filenames that I could not combine into a regular expression as described in @Chris J's answer, here is what worked for me
find . -name one.pdf -o -name two.txt -o -name anotherone.jpg
-o
or -or
is logical OR. See Finding Files on Gnu.org for more information.
I was running this on CygWin.
Try putting it in quotes:
find . -name '*test.c'
What's happening is that the shell is expanding "*test.c" into a list of files. Try escaping the asterisk as:
find . -name \*test.c
Source: Stackoverflow.com