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?

I think it has a better answere here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/130958/scp-wildcard-not-working-in-zsh — Syed Ali, Jun 20 '17 at 18:20
In particular, this answer: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/130967/13732 — ThomasW, Jan 16 '20 at 08:59

score 56 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 09 '23 at 10:25

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.

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 05 '12 at 20:54

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!

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 30 '22 at 19:14

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.