Why we enclose a file/pattern in "," in find but not in ls command

[Sangal-Arun]

Why we enclose a filename/pattern in double quotes " , " in find command with -name parameter, but not in ls command?

[user@build]$ find . -name "1.1"
<pressed ^C here>

[user@build]$ find . -name '1.1'
<pressed ^C here>

[user@build]$ find . -name 1.1
<pressed ^C here>

[user@build]$ ls -l "1.1"
-rw-rw-r--    1 user  scm           120 Jul 21 19:01 1.1
[user@build]$ ls -l '1.1'
-rw-rw-r--    1 user  scm           120 Jul 21 19:01 1.1
[user@build]$ ls -l 1.1
-rw-rw-r--    1 user  scm           120 Jul 21 19:01 1.1
[user@build]$

[Ben Cotton]

You don't need to quote the file name in your find command in this case. If you let it run long enough, you'll see it. It probably just hasn't finished working through all of your other directories yet. Try

find . | more

To get a feel for what it's doing.

[Sangal-Arun]

But, I want to search only few files or a single file amoung all others which can be more than 1,00,000 in some softwares. In that case, "find ." command will take much time. Thanks.

You don't need to quote the file name in your find command in this case. If you let it run long enough, you'll see it. It probably just hasn't finished working through all of your other directories yet. Try

find . | more

To get a feel for what it's doing.

[drl]

Hi.

One reason to use quotes in the find command is to prevent evaluation of a filename pattern by the shell. That means any use of the meta-characters to characterize the range of names in which you are interested: * [] ? Typically, one wants the find command to consider all files in a directory tree, so find needs to process filename patterns itself.

The explanations in info find are probably better than those in man find in this regard... cheers, drl

[scm]

Why we enclose a filename/pattern in double quotes " , " in find command with -name parameter, but not in ls command?

As has been said, you need to quote arguments if they contain characters that the shell would otherwise consider "special". In the case of find, if you let the shell pattern-match the filename (don't quote it) you'll only be asking it find the name in your current directory that exists. If there isn't a file of that pattern the specified pattern will be passed to find unchanged. You can play with echo to see the effect of quoting. Note that shell patterns are not regular expressions, for example, dot (.) matches any character in an RE while ? matches any single character in the shell; * matches any sequence of characters in the shell while it matches zero or more occurrences of the preceding character in an RE.

Learn to use quoting properly and your Linux days will be blessed.