'find' command suddenly not working in windows hosted agents

Question

In the YAML file defining our ADO build pipeline we have the following section

- bash: |
    pip install pylint
    find preprocessing/ subtyping/ visualisations/ -name '*.py' | grep -v hmm | grep -v /test_ | sort | xargs pylint
  displayName: 'Run linter'

At some point in the last week this stopped working. It still works on an ubuntu-latest hosted agent, but on Windows (either windows-latest or vs2017-win2016) it now fails with the message

FIND: Parameter format not correct

We have not changed anything, but our build process now fails.

• What has changed to cause this failure?
• Why does it only fail on Windows?
• How might I diagnose the problem?
• Is there anything wrong with our call to bash's 'find' command?

Answer 1

Find is a command in Windows that does very different thing to find in a posix shell.

And that would be the error you would get if you ran the Windows find (usually Windows find is located at C:\Windows\System32\find.exe

Answer 2

Your PATH may have somehow changed and you're now hitting the Windows find instead of the *nix-compatible one.

Try specifying the full path, i.e. /usr/bin/find (that's what I see on my windows bash shell when I check with which find) instead of just find in your build process command.