 <p>I'm wondering what could cause this. Aside from filesystem bugs, it could be caused by a non-ascii chararacter that got through somehow. In that case, use another language with easier string semantics to do the operation.</p> <p>It would be interesting to see what would be the output of this ruby snippet:</p> <pre><code>ruby -e 'puts Dir["msheehan*"].inspect' </code></pre>