为什么 ''rm *(1)*'' 可以删除名称中不包含字符串“(1)”的文件？

Question

I used the rm command in my downloads folder (windows subsystem for linux). although I told it to delete anything with (1) within it, all the files in the downloads folder were removed. Why would this have occurred?

rm *(1)*

Answer 1

*(...) is extglob syntax for "zero or more of ... ".

Thus, you told your shell to pass rm an argument list consisting of all file which start with zero or more 1 s, and then have any suffix following. Every possible filename matches this pattern, so the result is equivalent to rm * .

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If you want to be certain that a substring is literal rather than treated as glob syntax, always quote it:

rm -- *'(1)'*

...is going to behave consistently on all POSIX-superset systems, including ones that implement extglob -like extensions.