find commandwith path not returning results

[barry789]

Hi Board Members,
I am currently taking an online course on udemy.com to refresh my very old Linux skills. So consider me a newbie since it has been fifteen years since I was somewhat proficient.

In the course we are covering the "find" command and my results are not what the instructor is returning. When i use find with a path is returns nothing whether the file is there or not. When I use find from the directory it returns the result. For example:
[adminuser@localhost /]$ find /sbin -name zic
[adminuser@localhost /]$ cd /sbin
[adminuser@localhost sbin]$ find -name zic
./zic
[adminuser@localhost /]$ find /sbin -name lkdfhgod
[adminuser@localhost /]$


[adminuser@localhost /]$ find /sbin
/sbin
[adminuser@localhost /]$

Can someone shed some light on this for me? Thanks!

[TrevorH]

Your example doesn't work because /sbin is now a symlink to /usr/sbin in CentOS 7. Using /usr/sbin (the symlink target) works. To make it follow the symlink you'll need to use find -L /sbin -name zic

[barry789]

Thank you very much! The instructor must be using an older version as he was using /sbin in his examples, without -L.
I finally figured it out a few minutes ago when I did this:
[adminuser@localhost /]$ find /usr -name zic
/usr/sbin/zic

Thank you for confirming that /sbin was not formerly a symlink, that clears up the confusion.