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find
Raised as a usability problem by 35 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2011–2026), in 29 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Man page gives no practical usage clues, forcing web searchesUnreviewed
20112026- Hard to remember and needs long man page study for simple searches2024-11-17
- Man page opens with no practical usage clues, forcing web searches instead2023-05-24
- Man page and option syntax are confusing; user can't work out how to search by name2017-10-08
Escaping and separator conventions make robust text piping hardUnreviewed
20112026- Find's single-hyphen full-word flags break common conventions, making it awful to use2023-12-28
- Flag order and escaping semicolons make find impossible for most users to get right2019-10-26
- Escaping and separator conventions make robust text piping hard; find accumulates many flags2015-09-26
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 36 complaints
- Find's command syntax is huge compared with a simple walk pipeline2026-03-28
- Find is tricky for most users to get right2026-03-15
- Unclear which find/xargs incantation to use, and easy to get wrong with spaces in filenames2025-03-20
- Excluding a subdirectory requires an unergonomic -prune expression with confusing argument ordering2025-03-19
- Its expression language is weird, hard to use and hard to remember2025-02-09
- Hard to remember and needs long man page study for simple searches2024-11-17
- Path must come first, so changing the search directory mid-command is awkward when rerunning from history2024-06-07
- Find's single-hyphen full-word flags break common conventions, making it awful to use2023-12-28
- Man page opens with no practical usage clues, forcing web searches instead2023-05-24
- Beginners can't find a simple example of how to search for files2023-05-24
- The interface is confusing and awkward to use2022-07-31
- Finds the find command so hard to use that people pipe find into grep instead2022-05-20
- Excluding several directories needs a repeated -path -prune clause each time, which is awkward2022-05-20
- Search runs so slowly the user gives up before it finishes2022-05-20
- Find has a cluttered, hairball-like UI that is hard to use2022-05-20
- Can never remember whether the path argument goes first or second2022-02-15
- Its interface is confusing and among the least favourable Unix tools2021-11-24
- Find's option syntax clashes with the usual double-dash convention, confusing users2021-04-09
- Never gets find to do what's wanted first try; cryptic unhelpful error messages2021-04-09
- Has to google how to use find because basic file search needs too many arguments2020-09-18
- Unmatched wildcards return the literal pattern, and variables with spaces break grep2020-02-09
- Can't find docs on Emacs regex flavour or how to set case-insensitive flag2020-01-31
- Flag order and escaping semicolons make find impossible for most users to get right2019-10-26
- Can't remember find's syntax, flag behaviour, or argument order2019-10-26
- Interface design is so poor that documentation can't make it usable for most people2017-11-26
- Man page and option syntax are confusing; user can't work out how to search by name2017-10-08
- Obscure, confusing and self-conflicting configuration options make it hard to use2017-05-12
- Scripts break on BSD/macOS because find's default directory differs from GNU find2017-03-30
- Users only learn one narrow use of find and miss its wider toolset2017-03-18
- Escaping and separator conventions make robust text piping hard; find accumulates many flags2015-09-26
- Reports the flag mistake but makes the user retype the whole command2015-04-17
- Find's weird, unique syntax is hard to remember2014-07-27
- Using find and xargs safely requires a hard-to-remember -print0 flag2013-01-24
- Escaping {} and ; for -exec is unintuitive and only discoverable after being bitten2012-03-30
- Path argument before options and -print default behavior confuse the commenter2011-07-24
- Forgets to put search path first; wildcard behavior is confusing, requiring reruns2011-03-14