Learn Linux Shell Scripting - Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

What is globbing?

Simply said, a glob pattern describes injecting a wildcard character into a file path operation. So, when you do a cp * /tmp/, you copy all files (not directories!) in the current working directory to the /tmp/ directory.

The * expands to all regular files inside the working directory, and then all of those are copied to /tmp/.

Here's a simple example:

reader@ubuntu:~/scripts/chapter_10$ ls -ltotal 8-rw-rw-r-- 1 reader reader  29 Oct 14 10:29 character-class.txt-rw-rw-r-- 1 reader reader 219 Oct  8 19:22 grep-file.txtreader@ubuntu:~/scripts/chapter_10$ cp * /tmp/reader@ubuntu:~/scripts/chapter_10$ ls -l /tmp/total 20-rw-rw-r-- 1 reader reader   29 Oct 14 16:35 character-class.txt-rw-rw-r-- 1 reader reader 219 Oct 14 16:35 grep-file.txt ...