find command

apparently, that's not possible with find. From the NetBSD manpage on find:

NAME
     find - walk a file hierarchy

SYNOPSIS
     find [-H | -L | -P] [-Xdhsx] [-f file] [file ...] expression

DESCRIPTION
     find [b]recursively[/b] descends the directory tree for each file listed, evalu-
     ating an expression (composed of the ``primaries'' and ``operands'' list-
     ed below) in terms of each file in the tree.

Its job is to be recursive. If there are subdirectories there, they're going to get searched. I'm at a loss to suggest another tool to help, though-- the best thing I could suggest is to use a quick shell script, or something:

for i in pattern ; do echo $i ; done

That will list all of the file names that match your pattern. Like, if I put *.gz in as the pattern, I'd get all of the files that have .gz at the end, one per line. This behavior works like the command, but only in the current directory.