why is zsh globbing not working with find command?

Question

I have been using zsh globbing for commands such as:

 vim **/filename
 vim *.html.erb

and so on, but when I type in something like:

 find . -name *mobile*

I get the response:

 zsh: no matches found: *mobile*

Why?

Aloise

I think it has a better answere here: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/130958/… – Hedgepeth

In particular, this answer: unix.stackexchange.com/a/130967/13732 – Stingo

Answer 1

find . -name *mobile* # does not work

vs

find . -name '*mobile*' # works

The difference is due to the steps that the shell takes when it parses a line. Normally, the shell expands any wildcards it finds before it runs the command. However, the single quotes mark the argument as being a literal, which means that the shell does not perform wildcard expansion on that argument before running the command.

To demonstrate the difference, suppose you are in a directory with the following files:

$ tree
./
mobile.1
dir/
    mobile.2

In the first case, without single quotes, zsh will process as follows:

• expand the glob, rendering simply mobile.1 (because that is the only matching filename in the current directory
• pass the result to find, hence:

find . -name mobile.1

So find will only look for files named literally mobile.1

In the second form, with single quotes, the entire glob will be preserved and passed to find:

find . -name *mobile*

Which means that find will look for any filename containing the string "mobile".

The important thing to note here is that both zsh and find support the same wildcard syntax; by using single quotes, you induce find to handle the wildcards in this case rather than zsh.

Leesen

Answer 2

Turns out that all you have to do to solve the problem is add some quotes around the input:

find . -name '*mobile*'

I don't really have an answer as to why just yet...and the documentation doesn't have an something that sticks out to me, but let me know if you know the answer!

Aloise

Answer 3

For archival purposes, here is my substantial edit/reformatting of @Swiss's response above. The edit queue has been full every time I tried to edit, for hours, so I want to preserve this for future reference. I hope it's deemed to be constructive.

To be super-clear it's a revision of another person's work.

---

find . -name *mobile* # does not work

vs

find . -name '*mobile*' # works

The difference is due to the steps that the shell takes when it parses a line. Normally, the shell expands any wildcards it finds before it runs the command. However, single quotes marks the argument as being a literal, which means that the shell does not preform wildcard expansion on that argument before running the command.

To demonstrate the difference, suppose you are in a directory with the following files:

$ tree
./
mobile.1
dir/
    mobile.2

In the first case, without single quotes, zsh will process as follows:

• expand the glob, rendering simply mobile.1 (because that is the only matching filename in the current directory
• pass the result to find, hence:

find . -name mobile.1

So find will only look for files named literally mobile.1

In the second form, with single quotes, the entire glob will be preserved and passed to find:

find . -name *mobile*

Which means that find will look for any filename containing the string "mobile".

The important thing to note here is that both zsh and find support the same wildcard syntax; by using single quotes, you induce find to handle the wildcards in this case rather than zsh.

Avowed