A UNIX Shell Lesson

The lesson is: Wildcard expansion is performed by your shell. The commands won’t see the wildcards.

So if you type something like:

cp *.c somedir

it actually becomes

cp 1.c 2.c somedir

But don’t accidentally forget the destination, because then you’ll end up with:

cp 1.c 2.c

And you’ll end up overwriting 2.c with 1.c.

Luckily, I had a backup. Too bad it’s written in a different language for a different platform. Oh well, I was meaning to redo a couple parts.

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