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

Question

I am having a hard time getting find to look for matches in the current directory as well as its subdirectories.

When I run find *test.c

Answer 1

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.