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From: JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Command line arguments
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013 06:54:56 +0000 (UTC)
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BruceS <bruces42@hotmail.com> wrote:
> <<snip>>  From a terminal (in Linux), type 'echo *', and it 
> echos a list of the files in that directory.  Enclose in quotes (as 
> suggested elsethread), and type 'echo "*"', and get a single asterix. 

No longer a C question, per se, but bash's behavior (at least on
my slackware 14.0 box) is a bit more complicated than suggested above.
echo *     echoes a list of all files as stated
echo t*.c  echoes test.c because that's the only such file in my /home
echo a*.c  echoes a*.c   apparently because there are no a*.c files at all
So if there are no matches, it reverts to echoing the string rather
than emitting an error like ls would. Is there a more general rule
behind that behavior? I ask because I also have a C program,
in this case evaluating command-line expressions which can be,
say, a*b, and I've never (so far) had any problem. Is that just
lucky because there never happened to be any filename matches?
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )