Shell Programming and Scripting

I am trying to build a list of all files ending in *.cbl in the system, but when I try

Code:

find / -name *.cbl

, I only find one specific file name that is alphabetically first. Is there something I'm missing?

TIA

---------- Post updated at 11:20 AM ---------- Previous update was at 11:15 AM ----------

Never mind, I just used enclosed that in quotes and I'm getting everything.

For clarity of others finding this thread, you need to prevent the shell expanding your command line before it executes.

Wrapping your search criteria in quotes will pass the value directly to the find command rather than match all files in the current directory and passing them into the find command.

If you have two files, /mydir/a.cbl and /mydir/source/b.cbl, the following will have the problem:-

Code:

cd /mydir
find . -name *.cbl

This is because the shell expands the command to match the files in the current directory, so the actual find command executed will become:-

Code:

find . -name a.cbl

If you quote the search mask, you will get both files:-

Code:

cd /mydir
find . -name "*.cbl"

You can get odd results if you also had a file a.cbl in a subdirectory as that would be matched with or without the quotes.


I hope that this helps,
Robin