Note that the reason bash works here is actually a bit ugly. Like fish, it'll interpret an unquoted asterisk (sorry HN formatting) as the glob character. So it

Note that the reason bash works here is actually a bit ugly. Like fish, it'll interpret an unquoted asterisk (sorry HN formatting) as the glob character. So it tries to match pathnames to `host:directory/`. Only the default bash behavior (if "nullglob" and "failglob" aren't set) is to pass the literal glob expression if no match could be found. So once you `mkdir host:directory; touch host:directory/file` (which you can do - this is unix, so almost all pathnames are allowed), this will be broken. This means you _should quote the token_ in bash, which is exactly what you should do in fish. Note: This is also why you might see code like the following in bash: for file in *; do if test -e "$file" See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/004 http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/004 and http://mywiki.wooledge.org/glob#nullglob http://mywiki.wooledge.org/glob#nullglob for more info.