What is the difference between find * and find ~ for searching a file? In terminal when my present working directory on root,then in terminal
root@devils-ey3:~# find * -print -quit ~ On same directory
root@devils-ey3:~# find ~ -print -quit /root But if I change the pwd then the output of find ~ -print -quit is same as before but the other is change. What is the working purpose of * and ~ for find file ?
The basic format of find is
find WHERE WHAT So, in find *, the * is taken as the WHERE. Now, * is a wildcard. It matches everything in the current directory (except, by default, files/directories starting with a .). The Windows equivalent is *.*. This means that * is expanded to all files and directories in your current directory before it is passed to find. To illustrate, consider this directory:
$ ls file file2 If we run set -x to enable debugging info and then run your find command, we see:
$ find * -print -quit + find file file2 -print -quit file As you can see above, the * is expanded to all files in the directory and what is actually run is
find file file2 -print -quit Because of -quit, this prints the first file name of the ones you told it to look for and exits. In your case, you seem to have a file or directory called ~ so that is the one that is printed.
The tilde (~), however, also has a special meaning. It is a shortcut to your $HOME directory:
$ echo ~ /home/terdon So, when you run find ~, as root, the ~ is expanded to /home/root and the command you run is actually:
# find ~ -print -quit + find /root -print -quit /root Again, you are telling find to search for files or directories in a specific location and exit after printing the first one. Since the first file or directory matching /root is itself, that's what is printed.
First of all kept in mind the syntax of find:-
find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-D debugopts] [-Olevel] [path...] [expression] What is the difference between find * and find ~ for searching a file?
* is while card which matches everything.
Here find * passes the list of files/dirs in the current directory and those as target names to search for. so, it will find all files with the same name as the ones in pwd
(thanks to @terdon for explaining what 'find *' does ; see that answer)
So, find ~ finds for files and directory (recursively) within ~ (home directory)
root@devils-ey3:~# find * -print -quit ~
There must be file or directory named ~ inside /root which case above output. (not confuse with ~ as $HOME directory)
root@devils-ey3:~# find ~ -print -quit /root
Explanation for find ~ -print -quit:-
Considerable option: -quit:
-quit Exit immediately. No child processes will be left running, but no more paths specified on the command line will be processed. For example, find /tmp/foo /tmp/bar -print -quit will print only /tmp/foo. Any command lines which have been built up with -execdir ... {} + will be invoked before find exits. The exit status may or may not be zero, depending on whether an error has already occurred. ~ is taken as path i.e. /root because you are on rooted terminal.-quit prints directory name only But if I change the pwd then the output of find ~ -print -quit is same as before...
As explained above:- find ~ -print -quit prints /root every-time as path is set to ~ (which is /root because of rooted shell) and used -quite. (independent of pwd!)
~in your/rootdirectory?