CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxfind
user3442473
user3442473

Reputation: 303

Strange behavior of the "find" command on RH

on my Red Hat server I have a script inside the /root/ folder that performs some operations based on the contents of some folders. In particular

  1. find /PATH/TO_TEST/ -type f -name *.war → search for war files from a certain folder
  2. find /PATH/TO_TEST/ -type d -name jobs→ look for a folder with a certain name from a certain folder

Until yesterday everything worked properly, today a very strange thing happened (strange things happen at Hogwarts)

Command 2 works normally.

Command 1 only works if I DO NOT run it from within the /root/ directory

That is if I execute the command while I'm in /root/, the find command doesn't give results while if I go out from /root/ folder and go to any other folder the find command finds the files I'm looking for.

The path I look for is absolute, so the "where do I run the find command" should have no difference and HOWEVER, until yesterday it has regularly worked from inside the /root/ directory.

on other similar vm everything works as it normally should.

The version of find command and the SO are the same in all VM.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 117

Answers (1)

John Kugelman
John Kugelman

Reputation: 361546

Quote '*.war' to prevent the shell from expanding it:

find /PATH/TO_TEST/ -type f -name '*.war'

When it's unquoted, if there happens to be a *.war file in the current directory the shell will expand *.war to the name of that file. You want find to expand the glob, not the shell.

I'm guessing some .war file was recently dropped into /root. If there's a file foobar.war the unquoted version will expand to this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad command:

find /PATH/TO_TEST/ -type f -name foobar.war

Upvotes: 1

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