What you really should do is to stick shopt -s failglob On top of shell scripts (and on ~/.bashrc), so that a glob that doesn't expand will always be an error

What you really should do is to stick shopt -s failglob On top of shell scripts (and on ~/.bashrc), so that a glob that doesn't expand will always be an error. That way, you won't have that unquoted test.* work by accident, and thus it's easier to train yourself to always quote. Or, just use zsh, which has this behavior by default. Anyway here are other shell scripting tips: https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/safe-shell/ https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/safe-shell/