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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

`echo *` has many of the downsides of ls (doesn't escape e.g. space in filenames) and additionally breaks on directories where the expansion fills the command line buffer.

EDIT: Also note that "find ..." is also not safe from all the quoting issues without "-print0" or equivalent options to make it separate the names with ASCII NUL rather than linefeed or otherwise taking steps to handle filenames with actual linefeeds in them.

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Indeed. Those backticks only works in a shell, but in a shell why not just write

which is how filename expansion is supposed to work.

The back ticks were supposed to be quotes, I meant to say

echo *

However as per replies, this suffers from the same issues as ls.

The problem is not the backticks. They were just used as quote characters. The problem is that shell expansion doesn't escape the characters. E.g. this is a cut down output from my system now after I did a echo >'/tmp/ space ':

    $ echo /tmp/*
    /tmp/bspwm_0_0-socket /tmp/config-err-Q667kI /tmp/foolog /tmp/ space  /tmp/...

Parse that output and you get a broken list of filenames.

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