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I'm typing this in Bash:
scp user@remote:~/dir/*.xml .
and it works, getting all the files that make the wildcard on the remote server. But why does this work? I thought that Bash expands wildcard expressions in arguments before the arguments become visible to a tool like scp.
If there is no matching filename, then a wildcard expression in bash expands to itself. So, as long as you don't create any file locally whose name matches user@remote:~/dir/*.xml, your command works without quoting.
nullglob which would have it expand to empty string
Sep 7, 2015 at 15:25
nullglob doesn't cause the pattern to expand to the empty string; it causes it to disappear altogether. It's the difference between scp "" . (two arguments, one of which is the empty string) and scp . (a single argument and an invalid call to scp).