I realize the filename looks odd but when I check them from the cmdline, it works as expected.

You need to expand on what you mean by "check them from the cmdline". If you're saying when you run ls /usr/adm/best1_default/manager/foo/20060711*.vis it shows files, then you've missed what was being said about needing to use glob. Your shell will expand the wildcard *, the -e operator (among other things) will not. If you want wildcard expansion you need to use glob, or do something like using opendir and then grep'ing the results from a readdir.