Command Using Wildcard Pattern Doesn’t Work

Some UNIX shells may require quotes around wildcard parameters and some will not. For example, the C shell tries to expand arguments containing wild cards (*, ?) as files and will fail if no match is found. These pattern matching arguments may need to be enclosed in quotes to be passed to commands like mboxutil.

For example:

mboxutil -l -p user/usr44*

will work in the Bourne shell, but will fail with tsch and the C shell. These shells would require the following:

mboxutil -l -p "user/usr44*"

If a command using a wildcard pattern doesn’t work, verify whether or not you need to use quotes around wildcards for that shell.