带引号的查找命令导致“没有这样的文件”

Question

In my directory there are the files:

file1.txt  fix.log  fixRRRRRR.log  fixXXXX.log  output.txt

In order to understand the find command, I tried a lot of stuff among other things I wanted to use 2 wildcards. Target was to find files that start with an f and have an extension starting with an l .

$ find . f*.l*

./file1.txt
./fix.log
./fixRRRRRR.log
./output.txt
./fixXXXX.log
fix.log
fixRRRRRR.log
fixXXXX.log

I read in a forum answer to use quotation marks with find find . "f*.l*" find . "f*.l*" with the result: `

./file1.txt
./fix.log
./fixRRRRRR.log
./output.txt
./fixXXXX.log

It results in find: 'f*.l*': No such file or directory

What am I doing wrong, where is my error in reasoning?

Thanks for an answer.

Answer 1

find doesn't work like that. In general find's call form looks like:

find [entry1] [entry2] ... [expressions ...]

Where an entry is a starting point where find starts the search for files.

In your case, you haven't actually supplied any expressions.

In the first command (without quotes), the shell expands the wildcards to a list of matching files (in the current directory), then passes the list to find as arguments. So find . f*.l* find . f*.l* is essentially equivalent to find . fix.log fixRRRRRR.log fixXXXX.log find . fix.log fixRRRRRR.log fixXXXX.log . As a result, find treats all of those arguments as directories/files to search (not patterns to search for), and lists all files under . , (everything) then all files under fix.log (it's not a directory, so that's just the file itself), then all files under fixRRRRRR.log and finally all files under fixXXXX.log .

In the second one (with quotes) it searches for all files beneath the current directory (.) and tries the same for the file literally called "f*.l*".

Actually you are likely seeking for the "-name" expression, which may be used like this:

find . -name "f*.l*"