"find: paths must precede expression:" How do I specify a recursive search that also finds files in the current directory?
Try putting it in quotes -- you're running into the shell's wildcard expansion, so what you're acually passing to find will look like:
find . -name bobtest.c cattest.c snowtest.c
...causing the syntax error. So try this instead:
find . -name '*test.c'
Note the single quotes around your file expression -- these will stop the shell (bash) expanding your wildcards.