Question

My find is not working the way I expected. When there is more than one file it halts with error.

hpek@melda:~/temp/test$ ll
total 16
-rw-r--r--  1 hpek  staff    70B Mar  2 15:16 f1.tex
-rw-r--r--  1 hpek  staff    70B Mar  2 15:17 f2.tex
hpek@melda:~/temp/test$ find . -name *.tex 
find: f2.tex: unknown option
hpek@melda:

and if I remove one of the files, then it works:

hpek@melda:~/temp/test$ rm f1.tex 
hpek@melda:~/temp/test$ find . -name *.tex 
./f2.tex
hpek@melda:~/temp/test$ 

It does not matter what file I remove. As soon as the wildcard gives more than one file, then find halts.

Answer 1

*.tex is expanded by bash before sent as argument to the command.

find . -name *.tex

is in your case equivalent to

find . -name f1.tex f2.tex

Solution: Put "..." around arguments with wildcards to avoid the shell expansion:

find . -name "*.tex"

This will work as expected:

$ find . -name "*.tex"
./f1.tex
./f2.tex