find . -name *.txt

find . -name \*.txt

The difference resides in the way the * character is interpreted by the shell. In the first instance the shell expands the wildcard matching all the files with the ".txt" suffix in the current working directory (if any) and the resulting command is something like:
this obviously gives an error. If no .txt files are present in the current working dir the wildcard passes intact to the find command and it works as below.

In the second instance the * is protected (escaped) from the shell expansion and the find command actually looks for files ending with .txt under the specified directory tree.

Well, basically,
The back slant "escapes" the asterisk (and thus will find the files you're interested in.

Another way is to enclose your argument in quotes; e.g.,
You can also use brackets
will find every file with two digits as the first part of their names and
will find every file with Ab, AB, aB as the first two characters.

You can use the brackets in any position in a file name to isolate a particular pattern.

2 members found this post helpful.

a better way is just to put double quotes around them.

find /etc/ -name crond.*

That's odd, what version of linux are you using? It works flawlessly on my test system.

-name only takes a single argument, but crond.* expands into several arguments. -name eats the first match, but find assumes that the subsequent matches are additional paths to search.

I think quoting the wildcard will cause find to do the expansion itself, i.e. -name "crond.*"

You already got answers in this other thread of yours. This one reported as duplicate.

I did:
That's why i didn't work.

But from ~/ it works.

Nod, the previous poster was right, I hadn't realized you were in the /etc directory. Escaping the * should make it work from just about anywhere.

Merged 2 closely-related threads.