1

This is such a simple question that I'm sure it's been asked somewhere, but I can't find it. My shell, which I have not intentionally set up to do so, seems to eat any words involving question marks:

$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.3.42(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0)
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

$ echo a ? = =?
a =

$ not-a-command? echo a
a

$ (?) echo a
a

In case it matters, note that any word containing a question mark seems to disappear completely silently—to the extent that she shell never even notices that the invocation starts with a word that doesn't specify a valid executable—even if the question mark is not at the beginning.

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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LSpice
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2 Answers2

7

You probably have the nullglob shell option enabled; this causes any word containing a globbing character (* or ?) to be removed if the glob doesn't match anything. Thus, if you're in a folder which doesn't contain any file, folder etc. with a single-character name, ? won't expand to anything and will instead be removed; likewise, not-a-command? is unlikely to match anything and will instead be removed.

To check whether this is the case, run

shopt nullglob

To de-activate the option, run

shopt -u nullglob
Stephen Kitt
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2

it's like *, but it represents a single character

e.g. show the three-character root directories:

$ ls -d /???
/bin  /dev  /etc  /lib  /mnt  /opt  /run  /sys  /tmp  /usr  /var

note that /home is not shown because it doesn't match

Use [?] or \? or wrap your strings in quotation marks ("foo?" or 'bar?')

sourcejedi
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