wild cards on find and ls

Question

I'm trying to figure out the wild-cards to do file operations.

I have these files in a directory for testing purposes:

file_BSD.GIF  file_linux.gif  file_unix 

See my ls command,

$ ls *{.GIF,.gif} file_BSD.GIF  file_linux.gif 

Which is OK.

But "find" doesn't seem to work the same way:

$ find -name *{.GIF,.gif} find: paths must precede expression: file_linux.gif Usage: find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-Olevel] [-D help|tree|search|stat|rates|opt|exec] [path...] [expression] 

By the way, I've read that "-iname" should locate both the uppercase and lowercase files, but that doesn't seem to work either:

$find -iname *.gif  ./file_linux.gif 

(This should locate the .GIF file as well, right?).

Answer 1

find -name *{.GIF,.gif} is wrong.

This command is first expanded by the shell to find -name *.GIF *.gif

Then further expanded to :

find -name file_BSD.GIF  file_linux.gif  # as you have only these files in directory 

Now this -name file_BSD.GIF file_linux.gif is passed to find. And this is wrong as there is no switch like file_linux.gif that is accepted by find.

What you need is this command.

find -name '*.GIF' -or -name '*.gif' 

Assuming you want to collect .gif files in a case insensitive manner, this find command becomes,

find -iname '*.gif' 

Note the single quotes (') here. It means *.GIF should be sent to find as is without any shell expansion. And find will use this as pattern. This single quote is necessary unless you escape the shell meta-characters. In that case the command would look like

find -iname \*.gif