Question

I am a heavy command line user and use the find command extensively in my build system scripts. However on Mac OS X when I am not concentrating I often get output like this:

$ find -name \*.plist find: illegal option -- n find: illegal option -- a find: illegal option -- m find: illegal option -- e find: *.plist: No such file or directory 

Basically, I forgot to add the little dot:

$ find . -name \*.plist 

Because BSD find requires the path and GNU find doesn’t (it assumes the current directory if you don’t specify one). I use Linux, Mac OS X and Cygwin often all at the same time, so it’s of great benefit to me to have all my tools behave the same. I tried writing a bash find function that added ‘./’ if I forgot, but I failed. Thanks for your help. 🙂

Answer 1

If you can’t discipline yourself to use find ‘correctly’, then why not install GNU find (from findutils) in a directory on your PATH ahead of the system find command.

I used to have my own private variant of cp that would copy files to the current directory if the last item in the list was not a directory. I kept that in my personal bin directory for many years – but eventually removed it because I no longer used the functionality. (My ‘cp.sh’ was written in 1987 and edited twice, in 1990 and 1997, as part of changes to version control system notations. I think I removed it around 1998. The primary problem with the script is that cp file1 file2 is ambiguous between copying a file over another and copying two files to the current directory.)

Consider writing your own wrapper to find:

#!/bin/sh [ ! -d '$1' ] && set -- . '$@' exec /usr/bin/find '$@' 

The second line says ‘if argument 1 is not a directory, then adjust the command line arguments to include dot ahead of the rest of the command. That will be confusing if you ever type:

~/bin/find /non-existent/directory -name '*.plist' -print 

because the non-existent directory isn’t a directory and the script will add dot to the command line — the sort of reason that I stopped using my private cp command.