Hadoop HDFS copy with wildcards?

Interesting. This is what I get in my local VM running Hadoop 0.18.0. What version are you using? I can try on 1.2.1 also

hadoop-user@hadoop-desk:~$ hadoop fs -ls /user/hadoop-user/testcopy
hadoop-user@hadoop-desk:~$ hadoop dfs -cp /user/hadoop-user/input/*.txt /user/hadoop-user/testcopy/
hadoop-user@hadoop-desk:~$ hadoop fs -ls /user/hadoop-user/testcopy
Found 2 items
-rw-r--r--   1 hadoop-user supergroup         79 2014-01-06 04:35 /user/hadoop-user/testcopy/HelloWorld.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 hadoop-user supergroup        140 2014-01-06 04:35 /user/hadoop-user/testcopy/SampleData.txt

First of all, HDFS copy with wildcards is supported. Secondly, use of hadoop dfs is deprecated, you'd better use hadoop fs or hdfs dfs instead. If you're sure the operation was not successful (although it seems succeed), you could check out the log files of namenode to see what's wrong.

You need use double quote with your path that contains wildcard, like this:

hdfs fs -cp "/path/to/foo*" /path/to/bar/