A filename has an asterisk for some reason - it won't be changed and content not executed

Question

I use CentOS shared server environment with Bash.

ll "$HOME"/public_html/cron_daily/

brings:

./
../
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user group 181 Jul 11 11:32 wp_cli.sh*

I don't know why the filename has an asterisk in the end. I don't recall adding it and when I tried to change it I got this output:

[~/public_html]# mv cron_daily/wp_cli.sh* cron_daily/wp_cli.sh
+ mv cron_daily/wp_cli.sh cron_daily/wp_cli.sh
mv: `cron_daily/wp_cli.sh' and `cron_daily/wp_cli.sh' are the same file

This error might indicate why my Cpanel cronjob failed:

Did I do anything wrong when changing the file or when running the Cpanel cron command? Because both operations seem to fail.

Answer 1

The asterisk is not actually part of the filename. You are seeing it because the file is executable and your alias for ll includes the -F flag:

-F

Display a slash ('/') immediately after each pathname that is a directory, an asterisk ('*') after each that is executable, an at sign ('@') after each symbolic link, an equals sign (`=') after each socket, a percent sign ('%') after each whiteout, and a vertical bar ('|') after each that is a FIFO.

---

As Kusalananda mentioned you can't glob all scripts in a directory with cron like that. With run-parts, you can call "$HOME"/public_html/cron_daily/ to execute all scripts in the directory (not just .sh) or loop through them as mentioned in this post.

Answer 2

Jesse_b already answered the question, but I think it's worth to address some potential misconceptions.

The shell has characters that have special meaning under some specific conditions. For example: | is used in pipelines, > in redirections, \ to escape characters, etc. Those characters are not interpreted literally by the shell, so that's why when you do echo foo>bar, foo>bar won't be printed to your terminal, but foo will be redirected to the bar file.

Fortunately, the shell also has a mechanism which makes these characters to lose their special meaning: quoting. In POSIX shells, there are 3 quoting mechanisms:

• Backslash \: preserves the literal value of the following character, with the exception of a <newline>.
• Double-quotes "...": preserves the literal value of all characters within the double-quotes, with the exception of the characters `, $, and \.
• Single-quotes '...': preserves the literal value of each character within the single-quotes, no exceptions.

So, following the previous example, if we wanted to print foo>bar literally, we could have done:

• echo foo\>bar
• echo "foo>bar"
• echo 'foo>bar'

The asterisk * is one of those special characters, it is part of the pattern matching notation and is used for filename expansion. In other words, commands such as echo *.txt will replace the pattern with the files that the pattern matches.

In your case, cron_daily/wp_cli.sh* only matches cron_daily/wp_cli.sh, so mv sees 2 identical arguments and complains about it. That's fine because there's no cron_daily/wp_cli.sh* file. But if you had had an actual cron_daily/wp_cli.sh* file and more files that could be matched by the pattern, mv would have fail.

Consider the following scenario:

$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 0 jul 14 12:00 file*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 0 jul 14 12:00 file1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 0 jul 14 12:00 file2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 0 jul 14 12:00 file3

If I try to rename file* without using quotes:

$ mv file* new_file
mv: target 'new_file' is not a directory

That's because these are the arguments that mv receives, thus new_file is expected to be a directory:

$ printf '[%s]\n' file* new_file
[file*]
[file1]
[file2]
[file3]
[new_file]

To successfully rename file*, I need to quote that argument:

$ mv 'file*' new_file
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 0 jul 14 12:00 file1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 0 jul 14 12:00 file2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 0 jul 14 12:00 file3
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 0 jul 14 12:00 new_file