question on "find"

question on "find"

[Tony Gogoi]

I have another question.

"find ./*" displays recursively all files in this and its sub-directories.

However for some files that were ftp'ed from a Windows system eg.
something like in the one of the directories
"(Doc - PDF) My Document.pdf"
would cause "find *" to display "invalid predicate...." .
How can I overcome this problem ?

Thanks.

Thanks Mike and Raju for ur earlier responses.



Tony Gogoi

Re: question on "find"

[Stephen Samuel]

The easiest would be to just 'find . '
That tells it to search in the current dirctory (and also
find hidden files in the current directory, which "find *" won't)

I don't see why  "Doc - PDF" would cause you
problems, but I can see "-pdf doc" causing a problem,
because the leading '-' makes the filename look like a
find search option (and all other filenames after that
are evaluated in that context).

That can be worked around by using './*' instead of '*'
(replace '*' with any globbing pattern)
This would keep the first character of a filename from
ever being a "-"

Tony Gogoi wrote:
> I have another question.
> 
> "find ./*" displays recursively all files in this and its sub-directories.
> 
> However for some files that were ftp'ed from a Windows system eg.
> something like in the one of the directories
> "(Doc - PDF) My Document.pdf"
> would cause "find *" to display "invalid predicate...." .
> How can I overcome this problem ?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Thanks Mike and Raju for ur earlier responses.
> 
> 
> 
> Tony Gogoi
> -
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-- 
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		   http://www.bcgreen.com/~samuel/
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Re: question on "find"

[Glynn Clements]

Tony Gogoi wrote:

> I have another question.
> 
> "find ./*" displays recursively all files in this and its sub-directories.

Not quite. "find ." will do that; "find ./*" is equivalent to running
find with all of the files and directories which don't start with a
dot as arguments.

On Unix, wildcards such as "?" and "*" are expanded by the shell. E.g. 
the the current directory contains files named "foo", "bar" and "baz",
then "<command> *" is equivalent to "<command> foo bar baz",
regardless of what <command> actually is.

This is why e.g. "mv *.cxx *.cpp" doesn't work like "ren *.cxx *.cpp"
does under DOS. The command only gets to see the expanded list of
arguments, not the wildcards.

If you want to pass wildcards to a command, you have to use quotes,
e.g.:

	find . -type f -name '*.txt'

> However for some files that were ftp'ed from a Windows system eg.
> something like in the one of the directories
> "(Doc - PDF) My Document.pdf"
> would cause "find *" to display "invalid predicate...." .
> How can I overcome this problem ?

Just use "find .".

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements@virgin.net>