I ran the following command on zsh
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox*
It produced an error, when I ran the same command in bash it worked. Why does this happen?
How can I make the above command work on zsh?
Bash will try to evaluate the pattern rhythmbox* on the current working directory. As it is very unlikely there will be any file or directory starting with the sequence of rhythmbox, it will not expand, but Bash will provide it as an argument to apt-get here.
Note that if you have a file there with the name rhythmbox-test then it won't work as it will be expanded and rhythmbox-test will be provided as the argument to apt-get.
So, to reliably use the patters in apt-get in a Bash shell, you should always escape it. Use quotes or the backslash, e.g.
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox*
or
sudo apt-get install "rhythmbox*"
About the same goes for zsh.
The expansion of the pattern is called globbing.
touch aa ab # creates files aa and ab
ls a* # lists both files as Bash provided ls two arguments.
ls 'a*' # No such file or directory. Bash provided literally a* to ls.
ls a* # No such file or directory. Same as above.
