Wildcard Expansion When you type a command with a “*“ in bash, bash expands it to the list of all files in the directory and passes them all as arguments to the program. For example, “rm *“ , will remove files in the current directory.
Filenames Misinterpreted as Switches Most command line programs can take switches that affect how they work. For example, the ls command, when ran without any switches, looks like the output below.