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Hello,

I ran into problem - that I solved, but still not understand Maybe some of you guys can help me.



I found out that there was a file called "a". When I removed the letter "a" from "iptables" or when I deleted this file, the output was "[iptables] asdf":



Ok.. so when I use a letter in brackets, and a file with this letter exists, output won't be correct.

I played a bit arround:

file "a" exists:



If there are two words in bracket, then it doesn't care if there is a file called "a".

Please, can anyone give me a hint whats the thing with brackets in the echo command??

Thanks in advance!

First the global answer: filename expansion globbing. Read up on it
In more detail: If you use any commandline parameter without quotes, bash will try to 'fileglob' it to a filename. If it can't find it as a filename, then it fill pass it as a literal to the command in question.
So an 'echo *' will actually display all filenames in your current directory and an 'echo [abc]*' will display either all filenames starting with an a, b or c in the current directory, or if there are none the literal string '[abc]*'
Can you guess what happens with the command 'ls [abc]*' ? Hint: it's not 'ls' that does the fileglobbing!
Doing an 'echo "*"' will not do fileglobbing and just echo a literal '*'.
So you can either quote all commandline parameters: 'echo "I am the *best*"', or turn off fileglobbing with a 'set -f' (turn it back on with 'set +f')

[edit]
Ohw yeah, putting letters between square brackets means: take one of the following characters.
If you're breaking it up with a space, it's not a legal range anymore (unless the space is escaped) so it's taken as a literal again
[/edit]

Hi,

it's explained in man bash / Pathname Expansion.

Thanks, that helped me a lot!!

I've already read "man echo".. but couldn't find anything there.

/bin/echo for which is the echo man page, is not a bash builtin.

bash does the Pathname Expansion.