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

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.

Related Posts:

  1. Explaining the ‘find -mtime’ command
  2. How do I deal with a filename that starts with the hyphen (-) character?
  3. Bash: No such file or directory?
  4. Why do you need to put #!/bin/bash at the beginning of a script file?
  5. How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?
  6. “Couldn’t find a file descriptor referring to the console” on Ubuntu bash on Windows
  7. gzip: stdin: not in gzip format tar: Child returned status 1 tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
  8. Pass a password to ssh in pure bash
  9. -bash: syntax error near unexpected token `newline’ for display command
  10. How do I use grep to search the current directory for all files having the a string “hello” yet display only .h and .cc files?
  11. How to exclude a directory in find . command
  12. “sed” command in bash
  13. How to exclude a directory in find . command
  14. How can I find all *.js file in directory recursively in Linux?
  15. How does “cat << EOF" work in bash?
  16. Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal
  17. Extract file basename without path and extension in bash
  18. Given two directory trees, how can I find out which files differ by content?
  19. mv: cannot stat error : No such file or directory error
  20. Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal
  21. ./configure : /bin/sh^M : bad interpreter
  22. Trying to use bash on Windows and got no installed distributions message
  23. How to use regex with find command?
  24. What is the difference between “#!/usr/bin/env bash” and “#!/usr/bin/bash”?
  25. -bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory
  26. Is there a “goto” statement in bash?
  27. Bash script: bad interpreter
  28. How to count lines in a document?
  29. What does `set -x` do?
  30. How to get the process ID to kill a nohup process?
  31. Writing a simple shell in C using fork/execvp
  32. chmod: changing permissions of ‘my_script.sh’: Operation not permitted
  33. tar: add all files and directories in current directory INCLUDING .svn and so on
  34. What does set -e mean in a bash script?
  35. What does set -e mean in a bash script?
  36. Bash script prints “Command Not Found” on empty lines
  37. Pipe to/from the clipboard in a Bash script
  38. Linux Bash: Move multiple different files into same directory
  39. How do I write stderr to a file while using “tee” with a pipe?
  40. How to include file in a bash shell script
  41. How to enable Bash in Windows 10 developer preview?
  42. What does ‘bash -c’ do?
  43. bash sh – command not found 
  44. How do I know the script file name in a Bash script?
  45. How can I sort du -h output by size
  46. What are the functional differences between .profile .bash_profile and .bashrc
  47. How to run a command multiple times, using bash shell?
  48. How do I prevent accidental rm -rf /*?
  49. How do I sleep for a millisecond in bash or ksh
  50. What is “-bash: !”: event not found”
  51. What’s the best way to check if a volume is mounted in a Bash script?
  52. Keeping a linux process running after I logout
  53. What useful things can one add to one’s .bashrc? [closed]
  54. How to add a timestamp to bash script log?
  55. Colors in bash after piping through less?
  56. Linux command line best practices and tips?
  57. How to run command as user who has /usr/sbin/nologin as Shell?
  58. How to get pid of just started process
  59. Can you have more than one ~/.ssh/config file?
  60. SSH from A through B to C, using private key on B [closed]
  61. How can I fully log all bash scripts actions?
  62. How to apply a filter to real time output of `tail -f `?
  63. How to remove invalid characters from filenames?
  64. zcat/gzcat works in linux, not on osx. general linux/osx compatibility
  65. How do I grep recursively?
  66. SSH using python script
  67. Changing the resolution of a VNC session in linux
  68. X11 forwarding request failed on channel 0
  69. What is difference between arm64 and armhf?
  70. standard_init_linux.go:178: exec user process caused “exec format error”
  71. Using ls to list directories and their total sizes
  72. how to search for a directory from the terminal in ubuntu
  73. How to use dos2unix?
  74. How to add a default include path for GCC in Linux?
  75. How to configure both webserver and appserver for WordPress CMS?
  76. How to remove all plugins, posts, pages, and inactive themes in one line with wp-cli? WordPress bloatware removal
  77. Communcation with wordrpess and linux server [closed]
  78. Why is my crontab not working, and how can I troubleshoot it?
  79. Why is “chmod -R 777 /” destructive?
  80. How to check if a library is installed?
  81. Is it normal to get hundreds of break-in attempts per day?
  82. What does Virtual memory size in top mean?
  83. How do I find the UUID of a filesystem
  84. Find out symbolic link target via command line
  85. Meaning of directories on Unix and Unix like systems
  86. How to handle security updates within Docker containers?
  87. Is it possible to make Nginx listen to different ports?
  88. REJECT vs DROP when using iptables
  89. How to disable everything in crontab -l?
  90. df says disk is full, but it is not
  91. Perform rsync while following sym links
  92. What is the maximum port number?
  93. Show all users and their groups/vice versa
  94. Why is TCP accept() performance so bad under Xen?
  95. Caching/preloading files on Linux into RAM
  96. How to sort ps output by process start time?
  97. Is there a proper way to clear logs?
  98. protocol version mismatch — is your shell clean?
  99. How do I join two named pipes into single input stream in linux
  100. How should an IT department choose a standard Linux distribution?

Leave a Comment