ls recursively

It's a subtle "gotcha". Here's the important bit: Wildcard expansion happens first. Think about that for a minute, and see if you can figure out why it doesn't work. I'll tell you in just a second, but think about what's actaully happening first....

Alright. Let's say that the directory you're in has files "fovb", "govb", "gobv", and directories "mike", "john", and "frank". You type in ls -R *vb, and the wildcard (the asterisk) gets expanded. So, what actually gets executed is:

ls -R fovb govb

Because those are files, not directories, there is no recursion to be performed. Now, had their been a directory "jovb", then *it* would have been included, but not the directories "mike", "john", or "frank".

A couple of ways that (more or less) accomplish what you desire are:

ls -R . efgrep {pattern}

or...

find . -regex {pattern}

Piping ls to grep is the "quick and dirty" route, but find is much more flexible and powerful. I'm sure there are other ways of accomplishing it that don't occur to me, I'm pretty sick with a head cold, and I've had quite a lot of cough syrup tonight. = )