Bash for loop with wildcards and hidden files

Question

Just witting a simple shell script and little confused:

Here is my script:

% for f in $FILES; do echo "Processing $f file.."; done

The Command:

ls -la | grep bash 

produces:

% ls -a | grep bash
.bash_from_cshrc
.bash_history
.bash_profile
.bashrc

When

FILES=".bash*"

I get the same results (different formatting) as ls -a. However when

FILES="*bash*"

I get this output:

Processing *bash* file..

This is not the expected output and not what I expect. Am I not allowed to have a wild card at the beginning of the file name? Is the . at the beginning of the file name "special" somehow?

Setting

FILES="bash*"

Also does not work.

Answer 1

The default globbing in bash does not include filenames starting with a . (aka hidden files).

You can change that with

shopt -s dotglob

$ ls -a
.  ..  .a  .b  .c  d  e  f
$ ls *
d  e  f
$ shopt -s dotglob
$ ls *
.a  .b  .c  d  e  f
$ 

To disable it again, run shopt -u dotglob.