-1

If I type * in the terminal, it is an alias for Desktop. But if I define a variable x and set it to *, it is not treated as such. When are certain characters treated as strings and when as operators ? enter image description here

Stéphane Chazelas
  • 522,931
  • 91
  • 1,010
  • 1,501
Tejas Anand
  • 1
  • 4
    Please don't post screenshots of text. Copy the text here and use code formatting instead: https://unix.stackexchange.com/editing-help#code – muru Jun 18 '23 at 12:48
  • 4
    It has nothing to do with the _terminal_ and everything with the _shell_. You need to get familiar with the behavior of your shell (`zsh` for you, which behaves differently here than the more standard `bash`), around the keywords _patterns_, _wildcards_, _globbing_, _expansion_ etc. in order to understand what it does when it sees a `*`. Sorry but I can't give an exact explanation as I'm not familiar with `zsh`, I'm only familiar with `bash` which works differently here. – egmont Jun 18 '23 at 19:21
  • Related: [How to use a special character as a normal one in Unix shells?](https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/296141) – Stéphane Chazelas Jun 19 '23 at 16:12

1 Answers1

4

Your shell expands * to the names of all files (except names that begin with ".") in the current directory via a mechanism called Filename Generation also known as globbing or Pathname Expansion.

In your case, "Desktop" was the first entry.

Look at echo *, or ls.

Stéphane Chazelas
  • 522,931
  • 91
  • 1,010
  • 1,501
waltinator
  • 4,439
  • 1
  • 16
  • 21
  • And for that glob expansion of happen upon parameter expansion, that is for the contents of `$x` to be considered a pattern (and it to be expanded to the matching file via filename generation when in list contexts), you need `$~x` or `${~x}` while a few other shells including bash do it always for any unquoted expansion which could be considered as a bug. – Stéphane Chazelas Jun 19 '23 at 16:09