It used to be you had to escape the asterisk in the find command, if you didn't it would expand to the filenames in the current directory. that behavior apparantly changed. Does anybody know how long that's been? old way, if you were in a directory with the contents: blah one two and you did a find like this: find . -name *.txt It would have looked for the three files blah.txt one.txt and two.txt To do that find the way you wanted it to work, you would have to run it like this: find . -name \*.txt Now, with the version of redhat I have (AS4), doing find . -name *.txt looks through and finds the appropriate *.txt file like you would expect. -- Roger