Find all .desktop files in my system – failed

[Tony Arnold]

Johnny,

On 10/11/12 10:01, Johnny Rosenberg wrote:
> 2012/11/10 Tony Arnold <tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk>:

>> sudo find / -iname '*.desktop' 2>/dev/null
> 
> I am not sure what you mean (maybe because English is not my main language).
> 
> ”Escape the * in the name part”
> If I understand that correctly, this should work:
> sudo find / -iname \*.desktop 2>/dev/null
> And it does. So far so good.

Yes, that will work too.

> ”Or put the name part in quotes”
> Shouldn't that mean something like
> sudo find / -iname *".desktop" 2>/dev/null

That's not quite what I meant but I can see you might think that.

> rather than
> sudo find / -iname "*.desktop" 2>/dev/null
> Because * is not the ”name part”, is it?

By 'name part' I was thinking of the parameter you are giving to the
'-iname' option which in this case is *.desktop.

The purpose of all this is to stop the shell from expanding characters
like * in a command. Surrounding by quotes or escaping the * character
achieves this.

> But obviously not, since that does not work…
> 
> Anyway, I know what to do now, which is the main thing in this case.
> Thanks for your help.

You are welcome.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold,                        Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6093
Head of IT Security,                Fax: +44 (0) 705 344 3082
University of Manchester,           Mob: +44 (0) 773 330 0039
Manchester M13 9PL.                 Email: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk