On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, Adrian van den Dries wrote:
>
> What is wrong with this???
>
> $ find . -name alsa*
> find: paths must precede expression
> Usage: find [path...] [expression]
The * is being seen by the shell as a metacharacter. Remember that the
shell needs to parse the complete command line BEFORE it executes the
command. The shell is trying to see which files in the current working
directory match alsa*. If none match, the shell replaces 'alsa*' with
nothing and then executes
find . -name
This has no expression following the -name and hence find complains.
You need to escape the special meaning of * by using a backslash
find . -name alsa\*
This will work.
The are of course other ways of doing this:
find . -name 'alsa*'
Regards
Peter
----------
Peter Samuel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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