Unix, find command, and false negative

Question

Performing a search from the current directory where this file resides, this find command finds the file.

# find . page.tpl.php

However, when I search from a child directory, this command,

# find ../. page.tpl.php

prints out the list of files, WITH the requested file listed in the output,

.././parent_dir/page.tpl.php

However, the results are,

find: `page.tpl.php': No such file or directory

Then when I add the -name argument it works,

# find ../. -name page.tpl.php

I simply forget to use arguments sometimes and the false negative is really aggravating. What's going on?

Answer 1

find [path] [expressions]

A filename isn't an expression.

The default action is to print.

For path, ".." is better than "../." you almost never need to include "." unless it's at the start of a relative path.

Answer 2

The command find uses:
find [-H] [-L] [-P] [path...] [expression]

Your first example was:
find ../. page.tpl.php

What you did was give find two search paths. As the default expression is print, the contents of the two paths were printed to stdout.

Consider this:

mkdir a b c 
touch  a/file1 a/file2 b/SANTACLAUS c/MONKEYS
find a b

$ find a b
a
a/file2
a/file1
b
b/SANTACLAUS

Your second example was:
.././parent_dir/page.tpl.php

Here you provided one search path. The error tells you that page.tpl.php wasn't found in CWD. I assume this was due to your not having the file 'page.tpl.php' under the directory 'parent_dir'.