If you're asking what else are glob characters, you should probably attempt to understand the corresponding manual section.
If a word contains an unquoted instance of one of the characters
‘*’, ‘(’, ‘|’, ‘<’, ‘[’,
or ‘?’, it is regarded
as a pattern for filename generation, unless the GLOB
option is unset.
If the EXTENDED_GLOB option is set,
the ‘^’ and ‘#’ characters also denote a
pattern; otherwise
they are not treated specially by the shell.
What overloads me is the way pattern globbing (do we say that? or
just call it 'pattern matching'?) and filename globbing are
conflated in there. So very similar but so subtly different.
Anyway stuff is starting to stick to the inside of my skull. At
the very least I know where to expect trouble. Obviously it's
decades late to complain about any of this, but life would be
simpler if it was explicit that one wanted to generate filenames
or one wanted strings to be strings. That way there'd be no need
for a list of special characters. I know that echo doesn't decide
how it's arguments will be handled, still it's intuitive that one
echos a string. But I suppose the rule is to quote anything you
want to be immune to such expansions and it's as simple as that.
Unquote and you're taking your chances. Fair enough. It's an
early lesson.
Lawrence: > You can observe this with XTRACE: Gotta spend more time with that. Output can be a bit overwhelming but slow and steady -- the information is in there. A better tool is "typeset -p", which outputs an accurate (albeit sometimes difficult-to-read) representation. % typeset -p arr typeset -a arr=( $'a\nb\C-Mc' $'d\C-Me\nf' ) Yes! It almost doesn't matter that it's hard to read, the point is to catch that one is not the same as the other. Yup, that's a life-lesson. Peter: There's the special case of the GLOB_ASSIGN option where all assignments, not just arrays, undergo globbing. That's for compatibility with early versions of zsh, otherwise it's very confusing. Deus absit. What I might like is some way of turning it all off. Like unsetopt glob, yes? Actually, tho it started out as a purely academic question, I can now think of a place where I think I'll want to do that.