An unmatched glob is a fatal error in zsh, printing 'no matches found' and aborting the command

finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:52:00.038Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:52:00.038Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous

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With default options, a filename generation pattern that matches nothing makes zsh abort the whole command with 'zsh: no matches found: *.log'. Bash, with nullglob and failglob both off, passes the unmatched pattern through unchanged as a literal word. This is the single most common breakage when a bash script is run under zsh, and it also affects interactive use of tools that take glob-like arguments, notably 'pip install package[extra]' and 'scp host:*.txt'.

The per-command fix is to quote the argument or prefix the command with 'noglob', as in 'noglob scp host:*.txt'. The per-pattern fix is the N glob qualifier, '*.log(N)', which makes that one pattern expand to nothing when it matches nothing.

Globally, 'setopt NULL_GLOB' makes unmatched patterns vanish and 'setopt NO_NOMATCH' makes them pass through literally like bash. Prefer the targeted forms in scripts, because NULL_GLOB silently turns a typo into a command with fewer arguments.

Source: https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Expansion.html

zsh shell cli

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