Question

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?

Answer 1

Try putting it in quotes — you’re running into the shell’s wildcard expansion, so what you’re acually passing to find will look like:

find . -name bobtest.c cattest.c snowtest.c

…causing the syntax error. So try this instead:

find . -name '*test.c'

Note the single quotes around your file expression — these will stop the shell (bash) expanding your wildcards.