find command unpredictable behaviour?

Question

I am working on a remote machine,the disk space on the HP-UNIX machine was 96% so I was going to reduce the disk space by zipping some "*.extract.sys" files.

$find . "*extract.sys" -exec ls -lrt {} \;

Now the above commad is supposed to show the files with extension "extract.sys" but instead I am getting files with extension extract, some directories, and files with other extension.

why is this happening? I hope that its not because of the disk space.

EDIT: Is there another way around or I am doing some mistake/missing something

Answer 1

You want to use the -name option before *extract.sys; otherwise it will look in directories matching *extract.sys (in addition to .) rather that looking for files matching *extract.sys. Also you should use single quotes around *extract.sys instead of double quotes so that the shell will not treat it as a wildcard. (You only want find to treat it as a wildcard, not the shell.)

find . -name '*extract.sys' -exec ...