However, if you want a pattern that _does_ match to still be passed unaltered, you're out of luck. There's nothing corresponding to control over argument expansion in BASH other than quoting the arguments.
No, there is also set -f And I would not suggest pattern-won't-match tricks as a way to do things. It's a little gimmick you discovered you can use in some cases, which is fine, because when it fails, it doesn't hurt you because you are an experienced enough user to recognize what happened. But it's not actually a robust procedure and isn't a smart thing to suggest to anyone who even had to ask the original question. We don't know what "filespec" is, and so we shouldn't tell him that "file*" will pass in as it is as long as there is no "file*" in the current directory. That will just waste everyones time when someday there IS a file* in the directory, or he goes and tells the girls in his office "here, use it like this..." and they go and try to use the program without all this in depth familiarity with how the shell works and they type in path/to/somedir/file* because he didn't realise he needed to tell them not to, and there are file* in there. -- Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org