how to use find ?

[xujun]

What is the difference between :
find . -name "a*"
and
find . -name a*
?

and how to find a file under current directory but no including sub directory?

[Thierry Poels_1]

hi,

find . -name "a*"
--> find will search for files starting with "a"

find . -name a*
--> command line interpreter will expand "a*" to all files starting with "a" in current directory BEFORE executing the find commmand, so very probably NOT what you want.


to search files ONLY in current directory: how about using "ls" ;-)


regards,
Thierry.

[Arturo Perez del Galleg]

View this link http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xda607d4cf554d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html
Hope this help

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi there.
Sorry for bothering, but did you try the manpages ?
Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

For the default bourne shell (/sbin/sh), no difference between find with double-quotes or find without double-quotes.

# echo $SHELL
/sbin/sh
# find / -name "aaa*" -print | wc -l
97
# find / -name aaa* -print | wc -l
97

No difference in default bash shell as well:

# bash
bash-2.05a# find / -name "aaa*" -print | wc -l
97
bash-2.05a# find / -name aaa* -print | wc -l
97

No difference in korn shell as well:

# ksh
# find / -name "aaa*" -print | wc -l
97
# find / -name aaa* -print | wc -l
97

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

[Niraj Kumar Verma]

There will be no diffrence in theresult.

-Niraj

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

Note that for Linux and Solaris, you need to use double-quotes in your search term, otherwise your find will not work.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

It depends:

Is the same if there is not filename like a*

but is not the same if antonio and alberto file exists. This will find alberto and antonio files in each directory from .

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

Carlo is right.

find / -name aaa* works like find / -name "aaa*" only when no file starting with aaa exists in the / directory. If /aaaxyz exists, then the find will fail because it only searches for file(s) named aaaxyz.

find / -name "aaa*" will work regardless of whether /aaaxyz exists or not and search for files starting with aaa.

# ls /aaa*
/aaaxyz
# find / -name aaa* -print | wc -l
1
# find / -name "aaa*" -print | wc -l
98

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

[Luca Fasolo]

In reply to:
how to find a file under current directory but no including sub directory?

If you are on Linux:
find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.txt" -print

AFAIK, hp's find doesn't have -maxdepth,
you could use some kind of regular expression
(i.e. for my example, write a regexp for
"find all files whose name contains
only one "/" and contains the string ".txt")...
I think that the best solution (as suggested
by Thierry) is to use ls.

Hope this helps
--Luca