Hello, I have a very simple question but I cannot get much use put of the --help or man files!(too damm-many brackets [[]] 2 confusing to noob)..

1- Is find command case sensitive? Like if I am looking for a file Foo can I type find -name foo or do I have to say Foo?
2-Can I use wild-card or * in my find?
for instance I want to find foo but I say:
find -name fo*
can it read the * as a "dont care" statement?

Thank You in advance!

1 yes
2 yes

Linux (and all Unix-like systems) are typically case-sensitive.

In man pages, those brackets are there for a reason---once you get used to it, you'll find it helpful.

In Bash, the "*" is normally a wildcard. In certain commands which use regular expressions, it has a different meaning. The man page (sorry) will tell you all the details.

In find, it's a wildcard, but I've discovered I often need to to this: (Suppose I am looking in /usr/lib for a filename containing "foo")

find /usr/lib -name "*foo*"

I'm not totally clear on why the quotes are needed, but it works.

I recommend reading the Bash Guide for Beginners (free at http://tldp.org)

Well I can quote you the reason I gave you in an earlier thread. I'm pretty sure this is correct, was it not entirely clear?

Matey: use -iname rather than -name for a case insensitive search.

e.g.will find all files in your home dir with "foo" (case-insensitive) somewhere in the name.

I seem to remember there's a good article or two on linux-mag.com on using find, but the site seems to be down at the mo so I can't find it and link to it.

EDIT: I think these are the ones I was thinking of. Unfortunately you need to register to see them, but it's free.
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/1157
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/6981

Not remembering this from you---but no matter.

I think you've just cleared a mystery for me.....Much of the time, find works just fine without quotes. If I read you correctly......it works like this:
If the string after -name is not in the current directory, then the command works OK.
If there is anything in the current directory containing the search string, then it is passed to the find command.

Suppose there are 2 files containing the search string---they'll get passed in a list with a newline, n'est-ce pas? THEN what does find do??

All this aside, THANK YOU for pointing out what is happening.

iirc, you use single quotes ( '*foo*' ) so that they are interpreted by the find cmd itself, not the current shell, otherwise you could get 'too many args ...' error.

If there is more than one match for an entry like -name cmd*

That will expand the command to `-name cmd001 cmd002, ...' . This will cause an error. It's not the same as `-name cmd001 -name cmd002' which would be OK.
If there is only one match, then the cmd* will be expanded to a literal which would not cause a problem.

You could have
find */ -name "aname*"

Which would expand to something like:
find dir1/ dir2/ dir3/ -name "aname*"

This would be OK. You can explicitly have move then one directory in your find command. For example:
$ find /bin /usr/bin /usr/local/bin -name "ffplay*"
/usr/local/bin/ffplay


This can be a lot easier than trying to prune directories from a search.