zsh using wildcard during remote copy

July 21, 2026

1 min read

When using zsh I noticed it does not want to expand a wildcard on the remote end when using scp or rsync. You can quote it to work.

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❯ rsync -avn mgmt01:/home/ubuntu/*.md ./
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zsh: no matches found: mgmt01:/home/ubuntu/*.md
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❯ rsync -avn mgmt01:'/home/ubuntu/*.md' ./
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Transfer starting: 1 files
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NOTES.md