A question about command "find"

Question

find . \( -name "_*" -or -newer while2 \) -type f -print

In the linux command above , why _* should be quoted ?

Answer 1

Why _* should be quoted ?

If it isn't, your shell might expand the * to be substituted with files in the current directory. That's probably not what you wanted here.

Answer 2

First, the shell expands all unquoted *'s to match file names in the local directory.

After that, the shell runs the find command with that list of file names.

Generally, you don't want the shell to do '*' globbing in the local directory. Generally, you wind the find command to do filename matching in other directories.

The shell has several other things it does before running a command. $VARIABLE replacement is one of those.

Answer 3

if you don't quote it, the shell (bash?) would try to expand. if there's any file that starts with '_' on the current directory, you'd get something like:

find . \(-name _somefile _someother _file3 .... -or -newer while2 \) -type f -print

certainly not what you want. i always quote patterns, just to be sure the shell won't mess with them

Answer 4

A similar question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18836/why-doesnt-find-find-anything