Why do wildcards behave differently for different drives?

Question

I'm using a Windows XP SP3 machine. My Z: drive is a mapped drive to a UNIX box. There is a file called wk1_dailybackup_20110605043344.sql in both z:\archive and c:\archive.

At my CMD prompt from c:\archive the command

c:\archive dir *backup* 

lists my file, but when I go to z:\archive and type

z:\archive dir *backup* 

my file is not listed.

Questions:

1. Why do wildcards not work on the mapped drive like it does on the local drive?
2. What can I do to use wildcards on the mapped drive?

(Please don't suggest 'right-click Start, Search' to get the Poster Dog for inept searches.)

Answer 1

In Windows NT, processing wildcard directory searches is the province of the individual filesystem driver. In the case of a remote volume, it is the province of the client FSD for the network, which may or may not it its turn hand search requests over to the fileserver.

Without anything more than "It's a UNIX box.", which doesn't even narrow things down to one FSD on the client, let alone provide information about the fileserver, no-one can tell you anything more specific than that your network FSD, or possibly the fileserver that it is talking to, has decided that wk1_dailybackup_20110605043344.sql will not come up in a wildcard search for *backup*. For all that the rest of us know, you're using network software that has wildcard processing behaviour as a configurable option.