escape it, since you know the shell is going to be greedy about things.

rsync accepts globbing it's not a shell expansion that makes it work.

     rsync example.com:/foo/\* .

Well, the problem is that "example.com:/foo/*" isn't actually a local path that can ever be globbed by zsh alone -- it's an rsync/ssh/scp-style remote path, yet zsh interprets it as such. Not sure why. I think the solution is make sure zsh ignores arguments containing colons, but I don't know what the config option is for that.

Edit: Just remembered that zsh's over-eager globbing also fails with git -- eg., "HEAD^" must be quoted.

IIRC zsh has an option for this (if a wildcard has no matches, it just gets left in its original form), but I don't remember what.

There's also `noglob`, which disables glob expansion for a command (e.g. `noglob echo 3*4 | bc`).

Unfortunately, this has some unwanted side effects (see https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/issues/2945). The noglob option might work, if it doesn't prevent scp from working with local wildcards.

How about one of

    rsync -a example.com:/foo/. .
    rsync example.com:/foo/"*" .