Unexpected ls wildcard results? Am I crazy?

[davejjj]

I am just getting started with Linux (SUSE) and have what seems like a strange result. When applying a wildcard back in the ancient days when I did some Unix (or even DOS) I'm sure that a wildcarded directory request only produced a _subset_ of what was in the specified directory. Right? Am I crazy? Why is it that the results I get for ls a* doesn't list the items in the current directory that begin with 'a' but also lists the CONTENTS of those directories? Is this normal or do I have some goofy recursive user option messing with me? Thanks!

[Cabhan]

So the way that wildcard expansion works, the shell expands the wildcard, and passes the results to the program. The default behaviour of ls when given a directory on the commandline, is to expand that directory.

This is the "ls" output of my test directory:

alex@niamh:~/test$ ls
bash  c  c++  java  ruby

And this is the "ls" output with a wildcard:

alex@niamh:~/test$ ls c*
c:
a.out        ckpt_file  map_file  popen_bash.c   read_to_noread_mem.c  type_sizes.c
bitfields.c  file       ncurses   read_efault.c  shmem.c               userid.c

c++:
a.out  count.cpp

If I do not want ls to expand directories, I can use the -d option:

alex@niamh:~/test$ ls -d c*
c  c++