scp wildcard not working in zsh

Question

I have switched over to zsh, and it is working fine. One strange thing, when I try to scp with a * wildcard, it does not work, and I have to drop into bash. The second command below works fine.

Any ideas on why this would be and how to fix it?

~/dmp ⌚ 16:06:10
$ scp abc@123:/home/se/exports/201405091107/* .
zsh: no matches found: root@uf3:/home/se/exports/201405091107/*

~/dmp ⌚ 16:06:53
$ bash 
sean@seanlaptop:~/dmp$ scp abc@123:/home/se/exports/201405091107/* .

Answer 1

Bash and Zsh have different default behavior when it comes to failed globbing.

In bash, if a glob doesn't match anything, you get back the unmodified glob you used. In zsh this throws an error instead.

Thus you need to quote it.

scp 'abc@123:/home/se/exports/201405091107/*' .

If you want to get the same behavior as bash, you can do the following

setopt nonomatch

Answer 2

Checkout this answer at https://superuser.com/a/740728/978073

For zprezto users, prepending the command with backslash works!

Replace,

$ scp <command>

with

$ \scp <command>