Savannah, I have problems with "find --help" doc and with "find" functionality. Every once in a while I need to find a file that may exist anywhere on the system. I review "find --help " ... (Whatever happened to the internationally understood "tool ?" syntax, anyway? That's how I wrote my tools decades ago. Must every option be introduced with either - , -- , or + ?) ... back to the story: I review "find --help " to see what the parameters are. I pretty well understand the first one, but the second? Great to know all the ways I can say it, but say what? or ? --help glibly assumes the overall, higher-level purpose--the semantic--what it promises to do for me. Am I supposed to know about grep and fgrep already and deduce the semantic cue is ? You could have said so in a higher-level utterance, a la Backus-Naur, and THEN give the lower-level syntactic detail. Like maybe, find [umbrella-path] [filename-expr] Is --help only for people who don't need it? Then comes a kick in the face. "find" ignores the old Unix principle "no news is good news" (where if you want to see incidental information you give a "verbose" switch) and vomits out every path it searches onto the screen. Yucch. I don't want to wait for i/o. Just do your work without all that. Okay. I find the file myself, then see if "find" can find it, wildcarded or spelled out completely. My test file sits in /home/dz/Desktop/ It's called foo.bar Let's see what happens. My pwd is /home/dz/ and I say find /home/dz/ foo.bar All the paths in /home/dz/ vomit to the screen, but find: foo.bar: No such file or directory Next: cd misc find /home/dz/ foo.bar ...(paths vomit) ...(paths vomit) ...(paths vomit) find: foo.bar: No such file or directory Next: find /home/dz foo.bar ...(paths vomit) ...(paths vomit) ...(paths vomit) find: foo.bar: No such file or directory Next: cd ../Desktop find /home/dz foo.bar ...(paths vomit) ...(paths vomit) ...(paths vomit) foo.bar What is the use of a path parameter if I need to cd there for "find" to succeed? Next: cd /home/dz find /home foo.bar ...(paths vomit) ...(paths vomit) ...(paths vomit) find: foo.bar: No such file or directory ______ I am carefully trying not to need "find". Kerhighan and Ritchie, in _Software Tools_, say if your tool is too complicated no-one will use it. Has nobody else noticed this gaping hole in "find"'s functionality? Exasperated, DZ David Zethmayr dz@zethy.com