On Mon, Jun 01, 2026 at 05:34:21AM +0700, Robert Elz wrote: > Two other things I should have included in the previous message: > > Nothing changes if a word is treated as a glob, and subjected to > filename expansion, and fails to match (in bash, depending on whatever > options control the behaviour in that case) - in "standard" mode, the > original word is retained unchanged. > > And second, the best way to write a literal * in a filename, is [*] > not \* ... there's no question but that [*] is a glob, which matches > a literal * and nothing else. > > kre > > > There's actually a real bug in here:
| 16:25:38$ bar='\**' | 16:25:43$ echo $bar | \** | 16:25:51$ touch '*' | 16:26:08$ echo $bar | * The behaviour of `echo $bar` changed after `touch '*'`. The value of bar stays the same: | 16:46:40$ echo "$bar" | \** | 16:47:31$ type echo | echo is a shell builtin | 16:48:55$ /usr/bin/echo $bar | \** | 16:49:22$ echo $bar | \** | 16:49:46$ touch '*' | 16:50:13$ echo $bar | * | 16:50:17$ echo "$bar" | \** and now: | 17:54:41$ /usr/bin/echo $bar | * | 17:55:48$ echo "$bar" | \** I don't know how to reproduce this reliably. It just comes and goes. Cheers ... Duncan.
