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Shell Programming and Scripting

*.pm globs without quoting, *.pl doesn't.

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# 1  
Old 06-02-2006
*.pm globs without quoting, *.pl doesn't.
Can someone explain the following? I can use find on *.pm without quotes, but find on *.pl makes on error, I need quotes for the second version. What's up with that?

Code:
$find -name *.pm
./tieProxyStatus/Status.pm
$find -name *.pl
find: paths must precede expression
Usage: find [-H] [-L] [-P] [path...] [expression]
$find -name '*.pl'
./persistence/dbm/persistenceFileRead.pl

# 2  
Old 06-02-2006
'cause you do NOT have any .pm files in your current directory, but you DO have .pl file(s).

Without the quoting shell will expand the wildcards PRIOR invoking any command/find.
# 3  
Old 06-02-2006
Do you have any .pl files in the current directory? If so, the shell will expand '*.pl' into a list of files thus breaking the expectation of find. It may just happen that you don't have any files matching '*.pm' in your current directory so '*.pm' is passed verbatim to find. That's the expected behaviour.
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