find and globbing (and wildcards)

Question

I tried finding some files (*.e*) that are in the same directory as another file (md.tpr). I needed to list them (for further processing) using the following:

find . -name md.tpr -execdir ls *.e* \;

I tried a few variants of this command and some others (including single quoting the command passed to -execdir or passing it as sh -c 'ls *.e*' or eval 'ls *.e*' to name a few). It appears that globbing is not working when passed to -exec or -execdir. The error I get when running the above command is:

ls: *.e*: No such file or directory

Just as a sanity check, I did -execdir pwd and it prints what it should, so it appears that it's a problem with globbing, as those *.e* files do exist in the directories listed with this test.

Now, I was able to solve this problem in a much less elegant way but it just baffled me why globbing and wildcards wouldn't work here. Any ideas? Or am I completely off the track?

I use bash 3.2.25 (old but I don't have admin rights on that system).

Also, interestingly, if I do

find ~ -name .bashrc -maxdepth 2 -execdir ls -d .b* \;

it doesn't work unless it's done from $HOME.

Answer 1

The shell does globbing, not find. When you type a command that includes an unquoted glob like .b* or *.e*, the shell will expand that for you. This happens before find ever sees it.

You probably have files like .bashrc, .bash_history, etc. in your $HOME directory. So when run from $HOME, your command turns into find ... -execdir ls -d .bashrc .bash_history ... \;. When run from other places, the .b* glob doesn't match anything, so it gets passed through. This still doesn't work, as it is the shell that does globbing, not find -exec. If you wanted the glob to be expanded for the -exec, you would need to invoke a shell to do it:

find ... -execdir sh -c 'echo globs: *' \;