"find: paths must precede expression:" How do I specify a recursive search that also finds files in the current directory?

I am having a hard time getting find to look for matches in the current directory as well as its subdirectories.

When I run find *test.c it only gives me the matches in the current directory. (does not look in subdirectories)

If I try find . -name *test.c I would expect the same results, but instead it gives me only matches that are in a subdirectory. When there are files that should match in the working directory, it gives me: find: paths must precede expression: mytest.c

What does this error mean, and how can I get the matches from both the current directory and its subdirectories?

8 Answers

Try putting it in quotes -- you're running into the shell's wildcard expansion, so what you're acually passing to find will look like:

find . -name bobtest.c cattest.c snowtest.c 

...causing the syntax error. So try this instead:

find . -name '*test.c' 

Note the single quotes around your file expression -- these will stop the shell (bash) expanding your wildcards.

What's happening is that the shell is expanding "*test.c" into a list of files. Try escaping the asterisk as:

find . -name \*test.c 

Try putting it in quotes:

find . -name '*test.c' 

From find manual:

NON-BUGS Operator precedence surprises The command find . -name afile -o -name bfile -print will never print afile because this is actually equivalent to find . -name afile -o \( -name bfile -a -print \). Remember that the precedence of -a is higher than that of -o and when there is no operator specified between tests, -a is assumed. “paths must precede expression” error message $ find . -name *.c -print find: paths must precede expression Usage: find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-Olevel] [-D ... [path...] [expression] This happens because *.c has been expanded by the shell resulting in find actually receiving a command line like this: find . -name frcode.c locate.c word_io.c -print That command is of course not going to work. Instead of doing things this way, you should enclose the pattern in quotes or escape the wildcard: $ find . -name '*.c' -print $ find . -name \*.c -print 

I see this question is already answered. I just want to share what worked for me. I was missing a space between ( and -name. So the correct way of chosen a files with excluding some of them would be like below;

find . -name 'my-file-*' -type f -not \( -name 'my-file-1.2.0.jar' -or -name 'my-file.jar' \) 

I came across this question when I was trying to find multiple filenames that I could not combine into a regular expression as described in @Chris J's answer, here is what worked for me

find . -name one.pdf -o -name two.txt -o -name anotherone.jpg 

-o or -or is logical OR. See Finding Files on Gnu.org for more information.

I was running this on CygWin.

You can try this:

cat $(file $( find . -readable) | grep ASCII | tr ":" " " | awk '{print $1}') 

with that, you can find all readable files with ascii and read them with cat

if you want to specify his weight and no-executable:

cat $(file $( find . -readable ! -executable -size 1033c) | grep ASCII | tr ":" " " | awk '{print $1}') 

In my case i was missing trailing / in path.

find /var/opt/gitlab/backups/ -name *.tar