Bash Quick Start Guide

Using globs

A * unquoted asterisk character on a command line has a special meaning to Bash: it means it should expand the word in which the character occurs to all of the matching filenames if possible, but (by default) to leave the word unchanged if there are no such matching files.

This can be confusing, and is best explained with a few examples. Suppose our current directory has the following filenames:

$ ls -a
.  ..  .bashrc  april  august  october  september

A glob by itself will expand to all the filenames that are not prefixed with a dot:

$ printf '%s\n' *
april
august
october
september

Note that the filenames are expanded in alphabetical order – or, more correctly, the order specified by your language environment's collation settings. ...