Anybody knows why???

[MAD_2]

When running the find command, the following comes up:

$ find . -name *sh
find: missing conjunction

Anyone knows why this is happening? It runs OK in another HP-UX I am using. Environment issue maybe? I also ran as root.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

You have to understand that -name expects exactly one argument but the shell is expanding *sh into as many filenames that match that pattern as are in your current directory. All you have to do is enclose the pattern in quotes and that will let cpio expand the pattern rather than the shell.

find . -name '*sh' will fix you.

[MAD_2]

Stephenson,

Fine, that resolved my issue, thanks, but why is it that it does work on the other system with a basically similiar structure (same directory and files in it)??? Only difference, the other runs HP-UX 11 while the one where I had trouble is 10.2

[Helen French]

Hi Mynor:

The answer is, it depends on the shell you are using, the environment varibales set, the version of find etc. Normally different shells interprets/execute the wildcards (*,?) in different ways.

Read this document (TKB #AUSRCKBRC00003089), it will give you a better explanation:

http://us-support.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=ca36030e0f41f10775/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000050417063

HTH,
Shiju

[Bill Hassell]

AS Clay mentioned, the shell treats * (and other) characters with special handling. find never sees the * unless it is escaped. On other systems, the exact same statement may run differently because filename globbing has been disabled. From the man page for ksh, POSIX shell (and even bash), the -f option controls globbing or filename expansion.

Try this:

echo *
set -f
echo *
set +f
echo *

This illustrates that the shell is replacing special characters with matching filenames as long as globbing is enabled.

[MAD_2]

Thanks everyone!

The link given by Shiju is a good reference for those of you who look in here and would like a detailed explanation.