Hi: I was having the same problem, started debugging and then realized that it is just a matter of wildcard expansion within bash.

Meaning, if e.g. I have a file called 'compactfile.txt' and 'Compactfile2.file', and I do 'find -iname compact*', bash will expand 'compact*' to 'compactfile.txt' so the search will be very different to what you expect.

If you just put the search item within quotes or double quotes, it works.

changing compact for other words has various results
for example (aside from finding or not finding)


user@computer:~$ find -iname aword
find: paths must precede expression 'file name of one item'
find: possible unquoted pattern after predicate '-iname'?

find (GNU findutils) 4.9.0
Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

I was trying to find a file by name that contains the word: compact not sure if capitalized or not

so I used
user@computer:~$ find -iname compact
and got one result, not the file I was looking for

then I tried
user@computer:~$ find -iname Compact
and got 7 results including the previous one, my file was there

(originally on 4.8 that comes preinstalled, installed 4.9.0 and got the same results)