Prevent zsh from trying to expand everything

Question

Recently switched from bash, I noticed that zsh will try to expand every command or argument that looks like it has wildcards in it. So the following lines won't work any more:

git diff master{,^^}
zsh: no matches found: master^^

scp remote:~/*.txt .
zsh: no matches found: remote:~/*.txt

The only way to make the above commands work is to quote the arguments, which is quite annoying.

Q: How do I configure zsh to still try to expand wildcards, but if there are no matches, just pass on the argument as-is?

EDIT: Possibly related: scp with zsh : no matches found

Answer 1

It is an intended feature of zsh. when using any shell, it is considered best practice to quote any character that is considered a meta character to the shell. ^ is a pattern used to negate a string when the option extendedglob is set. * is a pattern used to match zero or more characters.

You can stop it by disabling the option nomatch. But by doing so, your unquoted patterns make your statements volatile, depending on what files may be present in the current working directory. You shouldn't do that.

Answer 2

For scp, see https://superuser.com/a/431568

For git, use ~ instead of ^.