I came across an interesting article on wildcards in shell: http://www.defensecode.com/public/DefenseCode_Unix_WildCards_Gone_Wild.txt
Tested some of the above in pdksh on a current OpenBSD-host: $ mkdir test $ cd test $ touch file1 file2 file3 "-rf" $ mkdir DIR1 DIR2 $ ls -al total 16 -rw-r--r-- 1 sturban sturban 0 Sep 10 04:26 -rf drwxr-xr-x 4 sturban sturban 512 Sep 10 04:26 ./ drwxr-xr-x 10 sturban sturban 1024 Sep 10 04:25 ../ drwxr-xr-x 2 sturban sturban 512 Sep 10 04:26 DIR1/ drwxr-xr-x 2 sturban sturban 512 Sep 10 04:26 DIR2/ -rw-r--r-- 1 sturban sturban 0 Sep 10 04:26 file1 -rw-r--r-- 1 sturban sturban 0 Sep 10 04:26 file2 -rw-r--r-- 1 sturban sturban 0 Sep 10 04:26 file3 $ rm * $ ls -al total 8 -rw-r--r-- 1 sturban sturban 0 Sep 10 04:26 -rf drwxr-xr-x 2 sturban sturban 512 Sep 10 04:26 ./ drwxr-xr-x 10 sturban sturban 1024 Sep 10 04:25 ../
