On archlinux during an upgrade, the package manager backups some files in /etc with a .pacnew extension. On my system there are 20 such files, 9 .pacnew files located in /etc and 11 .pacnew files in subdirectories of /etc. The following commands are run from /etc: $ shopt -s globstar $ ls **/*.pacnew | wc -w 20 $ ls *.pacnew | wc -w 9 With python: $ python Python 3.6.0a0 (default:72cca30f4707, Nov 2 2015, 14:17:31) [GCC 5.2.0] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import glob >>> len(glob.glob('./**/*.pacnew', recursive=True)) 20 >>> len(glob.glob('*.pacnew')) 9 >>> len(glob.glob('**/*.pacnew', recursive=True)) 11 The '**/*.pacnew' pattern does not list the files in /etc, only those located in the subdirectories of /etc.