in controller write like this
@friend = User.find(params[:id]) @friends = User.find(:all, :conditions => ["LIKE ?", <what u want to find>])
Kumar: Not sure how this helps with limiting the results. "WHERE LIKE ..." isn't valid SQL either.
Cass: Stack trace shows line 24 to be the problem. The controller code you posted is syntactically valid ruby/rails (except that you should just do :limit => 5 rather than "5") so it's hard to tell why you're getting that error. Which line is line 24?
Do you have your has_many :friends in the User model? My thought is that you may be mistakenly calling Enumerable#find (which takes 1 argument) rather than AR::Base#find (which takes 2).
The rest of the stack trace should show you whether or not AR::Base#find is being called.