find Exhibits Strange Behavior ?

[Randall R Schulz]

Paul,

Always quote the pattern arguments so they're not expanded by the shell 
before being passed on to "find."

This is just as it is on any ixoid platform.

Shells have options about what to do with glob expressions when no matches 
are present. In BASH it's the "nullglob" option. Not knowing how you have 
it set nor what files exist in the directories where you tried the various 
invocations, it's hard to give a definitive explanation for what you're 
experiencing.

Example:

% shopt -s nullglob
% echo *.glarch

% shopt -u nullglob
% echo *.glarch
*.glarch


Randall Schulz


At 15:20 2003-01-18, Paul T. Karch wrote:
>After I startup with cygwin.bat I am put
>into the /home/user directory.
>If I try to do any of the commands:
>find . -iname *.c
>find  -iname *.c
>find / -iname *.c
>
>I get the following:
>
>find: paths must precede expression
>Usage: find [path...] [expression]
>
>If I enter:
>find *.c
>it works OK, but not recursively
>(as I found out in a 2nd pass on the test).
>
>I made a subdirectory of  "user"; copied some files;
>  and cd'ed to it and entered:
>
>find  . -iname *.c
>
>it works fine.
>
>If  I cd to / and enter
>  find . -iname *.c
>it displays some results, but if I
>cd to usr and issue the same command
>I get more results than I got in the "higher"
>/ directory.  But doesn't this  mean that
>find is not working recursively as it should ?
>
>However under "/" I changed the command to
>find / -iname '*.c'
>and it worked as I expected.  Thus emboldened,
>I cd'ed to ~ and tried   find . -iname '*.c'     and
>it worked fine.
>
>This is not really a problem, I guess, but it is curious.
>Also I may not be interpreting the meaning of the find command
>properly.  Any comments ?
>
>Paul T. Karch


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