Two other things I should have included in the previous message: Nothing changes if a word is treated as a glob, and subjected to filename expansion, and fails to match (in bash, depending on whatever options control the behaviour in that case) - in "standard" mode, the original word is retained unchanged.
And second, the best way to write a literal * in a filename, is [*] not \* ... there's no question but that [*] is a glob, which matches a literal * and nothing else. kre
