File server tool not finding files.

[breathe67]

My apologies for not having had time to write a 'proper' bug report', however does anyone know off-hand the reason for the behavior below ?

I installed the basic MCP filesystem server tool on 3/25/2025, and asked Claude Desktop (in Windows) to find all files matching "statement". It found none, thought there are several there. The response it gave me:

  {
    `path`: `C:\\Users\\breat\\Downloads`,
    `pattern`: `*statement*`
  }
  No matches found

When I asked it to to find a specific filename, it worked. The prompt was:

 search for any file named "statement (7).pdf"

(Note I had to use Claude 3.5 Haiku, due to current server limitations.)

[cfritze64]

Same issue here. Even if I ask "is there a file named X in folder Y" it doesn't find it, though I can guide it to folder Y and folder Y plainly contains the file...

[akarel-mb]

I was/am having similar issues. I found that if I prompt after a failure with this:

I have verified that they exist. Could this be related to windows vs linux paths?

It would then respond with:

Yes, the issue might be related to path formatting differences between Windows and Linux. The tool might be expecting a different path format. Let me try accessing the files again using a different approach.

And it would be able to find/read the files.

[sebastien-rosset]

Sometimes the LLM was confused what is the exact syntax for file name matching. The filesystem tool API does not make it very clear whether file name matching is based on substring match, regex match, glob pattern or something else.

This should be fixed in #897