"Illegal option" error when using find on macOS

Question

I am trying to list the files only with the letter "R" at the end. I used find as follows in macOS Terminal,

find -type f -name '*R' 

But I got the message saying illegal option --t.

Solution

The first argument to find is the path where it should start looking. The path . means the current directory.

find . -type f -name '*R'

You must provide at least one path, but you can actually provide as many as you want:

find ~/Documents ~/Library -type f -name '*R'

Comments

[Reinstate Monica Please]

You should probably specify that you're talking about bsd find. find -type f -name '*R' is completely fine in gnu.

[rob mayoff]

I'm talking about standard POSIX find.

[Reinstate Monica Please]

Yes, but the reason for the confusion here is likely that gnu find will default to . if you don't provide an argument. Mac OS uses bsd by default, which requires an argument if you don't provide one to -f. And using statements like must provide at least one path without specifying a version of find is likely just going to cause more confusion.

[Cole Bittel]

I came to this question, having the exact same confusion that @BroSlow was suggesting.