Confused about grep and the * wildcard

You're confusing the different meaning of * for Shell Filename Expansion and Posix Basic Regex.

In Regex, * is the quantifier for the character in front of it, so h* means 0 or more occurrences of h. If you want "any number of any character", use .*.

grep '*' would look for literal * as there is nothing in front of it to quantify, while grep '**' would like for 0 or more occurrences of *, so everything will fit as 0 occurrences of something will always fit.

Anyways, you should rather use find with argument -path "*/flash/*" instead of grep the output of find.

find . -not -path './flash_drive_data*' | grep "./*flash*"

The thing here is that grep uses regular expressions, while find -path uses shell glob style pattern matches. The asterisk has a different meaning in those two.

The regular expression ./*flash* matches first any character (.), then zero or more slashes (/*), then a literal string flas, then any number (zero or more) of h characters. 3/flas matches that (with zero times h), and so would e.g. reflash (with zero times /).

You could just use grep flash instead, given that it matches anywhere in the input, so leading and tailing "match anything" parts are unnecessary.

Or use find -path './*flash*' -and -not -path './flash_drive_data*'

When I replaced grep "*flash*" with just grep "*", I got [no matches].

Since the asterisk means "any number of the previous atom", it's not really well defined here. grep interprets that as a literal asterisk, but really it should be an error.

However, when I ran: find . -not -path './flash_drive_data*' -exec tar cfv home.tar.bz '{}' + I was getting output including things like:

./flash_drive_data/index2/ask-sdk-core/dist/dispatcher/error/handler/

so flash_drive_data files were being included.

Note that tar stores files recursively, and the first output of that find is . for the current directory, so everything will be stored. You may want to use ! -type d with find to exclude directories from the output, or (better), look at the -exclude=PATTERN options to tar.