(Ubuntu/Linux)“find” command gives different results based on quotation marks

Question

I was using

find -iname *prib*

and getting only one result "./prib09jack.pdf" with

find -iname "*prib*" 

I get many more results that I was looking for such as

./Dir1/PRIB09/prib09jackTFF1.pdf

and many more, but why did it matter that the quotation marks were around "prib"?

Best.

Answer 1

If there is a file (or files) matching *prib* in the current directory when the find command is run, the shell will expand the wildcard to match the file name(s) first before handing the arguments to find, and result in a different command being run than the user expects.

For example,

$ ls foo*
foobar

$ find -iname foo*
./foobar

$ find -iname "foo*"
./foobar
./dir/foobz
./dir2/fooblat

In short, Quotes delay wildcard interpretation for the find command to perform. Lack of quotes expands immediately.

Answer 2

The issue is that your shell is expanding the wildcard *'s before handing them to find. You want find to get them, so you need to escape them. The quotes do that, or you could do

find -iname \*iprib\*

and it would work as well. The key thing is, you want the wildcards to make it to find uninterpreted by anything else along the way (like your shell).

Answer 3

Not sure what version (or shell) of find you are using, but I have always had to add a path before pattern:

find . -iname "*prib*"

Would recurse from current directory. (".")

If you used:

find /etc -iname "*prib*"

it would recurse the /etc directory.

The following would limit 'find' to 2 directory levels from search path ( . )

find . -maxdepth 2 -iname "*prib*"

Man Page:

-iname pattern

Like -name, but the match is case insensitive. For example, the patterns fo*' andF??' match the file names Foo',FOO', foo',fOo', etc. In these patterns, unlike filename expansion by the shell, an initial '.' can be matched by '*'. That is, find -name *bar will match the file `.foobar'. Please note that you should quote patterns as a matter of course, otherwise the shell will expand any wildcard characters in them.