10/29/2015 By emehany
Task: a ton of data comes in the form of zipped massive folders require to be decompressed.
The Problem
Whenever you use a wildcard (*
), the shell itself will expand that and pass the results to the program rather than the program handling the expansion itself. That means that our previous command was actually expanded to the following before being executed:
unzip a.zip b.zip c.zip
Just because the shell expands out wildcard characters automatically doesn’t mean that programs can’t as well. The simple solution to this problem is to quote the argument to prevent the shell from interpreting it:
unzip '*.zip'
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