-name and metacharacters

[Ronald Rechenmacher]

Hi,

How long has this been true (excerpt from man page under "-name pattern"
section):
        The metacharacters  (`*', `?', and `[]') do not match a
         `.' at the start of the base  name.

Has it been years?  I use Linux, IRIX and SunOS so I get confused
sometimes, but
I could have sworn at one time all the systems find's would match `.' at
the start of a
basename.

Anyhow, it seems as if now only find on IRIX does.

What would it take to get an option added to gnu find to allow the
metacharacters
to match `.' at the start of the base name? Or possible change the
default behavior back
(if it was every changed)?

I've found that I have, over the years, wrote several shell scripts that
assume it does.
I thought "hiding" basenames that start with `.' was only a concept for
'ls'
If the default behavior was to match, the user could always specify
'[^.]'
I realize a work around is: find . | grep '<grep_re>'

Thanks
--
Ronald D. Rechenmacher
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Batavia, Illinois, USA