Further questions about -path for find

Question

From https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/81379/674

-path does not (re)define the start path. It refers to the combination of the start path and the relative path of the currently examined object.
- Does "start path" mean the argument path to find?:
```
find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-D debugopts] [-Olevel] [path...] [expression]
```
- What does "combination of the start path and the relative path of the currently examined object" mean?
You may by this e.g. find all files within a subdirectory src no matter on which level.

How is 'find all files within a subdirectory src no matter on which level" done?
"do not treat / or . specially" means that * can match both file names including the extension and into subdirectories: [...]/file* would match both /file.txt and /files/foo.bar

"do not treat / or . specially" doesn't mention *, so does "do not treat / or . specially" only apply to *?

Your question refers to somebody's wording of an answer in a different thread. Perhaps you should ask for clarification in a comment? — lcd047, May 04 '15 at 16:59

G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica' · Answer 1 · 2020-09-02T03:23:05.367

Yes, "start path" means one of the directory names that appear near the beginning of the find command, after the options but before the expression. I interpret the question that you linked to as suggesting that that OP was confused about the difference between
```
find /etc ...
```
and
```
find -path /etc ...
```
- "It refers to the combination of the start path and the relative path of the currently examined object."
  
  I guess the author of that answer is imagining that you have a directory called tools/crowbar, which contains files drink, food, foolishness, and wisdom. If you say
```
find tools/crowbar -path "*bar/foo*"
```
  it will find tools/crowbar/food and tools/crowbar/foolishness, but not the other two.
I agree with lcd047. To put it another way, if you have a directory structure like
```
.
├───cat
│   ├───dog
│   │   └───kennel
│   └───tac
│       └───src
├───dest
├───original
│   ├───recipe
│   └───src
└───src
```
then
```
find . -path "*/src/*"
```
will find things in all three src folders (and all subdirectories thereof) without reporting things in cat, cat/dog, cat/dog/kennel, cat/tac, dest, original, or original/recipe.
It helps to read entire paragraphs, and not just cherry-pick sentence fragments and expect them to make sense in isolation. The discussion of the -path test in find(1) says,
-path pattern
```
find . -path "./sr*sc"
```
will print an entry for a directory called ‘./src/misc’ (if one exists). ...
OK, when you see "file name", "shell pattern", and "metacharacters" all on the same line, you’re expected to think of the shell’s pattern matching / pathname expansion, which has special pattern characters *, ?, and [...]. ("Metacharacter" is basically a $10 word for "special character".) And then it goes and shows you an example with a * in it! So you should be able to figure out what it’s talking about.

So, what is it saying? Look at the example: sr*sc matches src/misc. This is a difference from pathname expansion in the shell, where you would generally need to use something like sr*/*sc to match src/misc. And, no, this doesn’t apply only to *; -path "sr????sc" and -path "sr[cim/][cim/][cim/][cim/]sc" work the same way.

And what they don’t bother to mention is that -path "*sr*sc" will match not only src/misc but also .src/misc and src/.misc; even though *sr*/*sc generally won’t match those (in the shell) because, in the shell’s pathname expansion, * generally doesn’t match names that begin with ..

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited May 07 '15 at 10:10

To avoid confusion you should probably think of the prototype for find(1) like this:

find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-D debugopts] [-Olevel] [dir...] [expression]

find(1) finds files in dir. expression is a logical expression formed of tests that are applied to the files found. -path, -name, -type are examples of such tests.

above basically says -path doesn't set dir, but it's argument is taken as relative to dir.
says -path '*src*' matches both ./src/foo/bar/test.c and ./foo/src/bar/test.c, but not ./foo/bar/test.c.
says * is a wildcard, and it matches across directories. It also says you shouldn't confuse it with * from the DOS / Windows world, where you need to write *.* to match files with "extensions".

Or at least this is my understanding of it.

Further questions about -path for find

2 Answers2

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