this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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A Surprisingly Common Mistake Involving Wildcards & The Find Command (blog.robertelder.org)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by unglueclass23@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev
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I came across this older article from 2020 and I found it informative. It's about how the shell does globbing and the potential issues it can cause if not understood correctly.

TLDR:

find . -not -name *.py -delete and find . -not -name '*.py' -delete will behave differently in certain scenarios.

In the first example, the shell will replace the wildcard pattern with a list of matching file names IF there are any matches in the current directory. If there isn't, then it won't do anything and will pass *.py to find.

In the second example, the shell won't do any globbing at all and will just pass *.py

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[–] unglueclass23@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago

I use bash and it did throw that error, however the find . | egrep *.py example at the end did not.