Ubuntu – find: unknown predicate

bashfind

This is probably not a Ubuntu question as such, but a Linux one instead, still hope some Linux user out there can help me understand this.

I'm trying to use the find command to look for some files an a directory tree.

Unfortunately some of the files are named beginning with a dash, like -000.jpg, -002.jpg, 00n.jpg and so on.
However, every time that the command locates one of the files named that way, it just interrupts the process and complains in the following way:

find: unknown predicate `-001.jpg'

or whatever the file beginning with a dash is named.

It seems to me that somehow the find command is interpreting the resulting filename as an argument, but I haven't found a way to circumvent this behavior.

Thanks in advance for sharing your wisdom.

Best Answer

Make sure you quote the patterns you provide to find, otherwise the shell may expand them if there are matching files in the current dir.

find /some/dir -name *.jpg   # bad
find /some/dir -name "*.jpg" # good

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/UsingFind.

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