Glob that doesn't match anything expands to itself, rather than to nothing

Question

I want to iterate over the files in a folder of a special type (like .test ):

So I wrote a little script names for_loop :

for f in *.test
do
 echo 'This is f: '${f}
done

After ( chmod +x for_loop ) I can start it with ./for_loop .

If there are .test -files, everthing is fine, BUT if there is no file in the folder that matches *.test , the for-loop is still executed once. In this case the output looks like:

This is f: *.test

But I thought that if there were no files in the folder that match the glob pattern, there would be no output. Why is this not the case?

Answer 1

This is the default behaviour.

to get rid of it, enable nullglob :

shopt -s nullglob

From Greg's Wiki - nullglob :

nullglob expands non-matching globs to zero arguments, rather than to themselves.

...

Without nullglob, the glob would expand to a literal * in an empty directory, resulting in an erroneous count of 1.

Or use zsh , which has this glob enabled by default!

$ for f in *.test; do echo "$f"; done
zsh: no matches found: *.test