for those who aren't familiar with the nitty gritty, what's happening here is that bash (your shell) expands the "glob" (* .txt) before it ever runs ls, so what

for those who aren't familiar with the nitty gritty, what's happening here is that bash (your shell) expands the "glob" (* .txt) before it ever runs ls, so what actually gets run isn't 'ls * .txt', it's 'ls foo.txt bar.txt dog.txt' etc. but when you put quotes around "* .txt", that tells bash not to expand the glob. so in the above case, '* .txt' is actually getting passed into git, rather than 'foo.txt bar.txt dog.txt' etc. I'm not a git user, but it sounds like git has special handling for "* .txt" which causes it to perform its own glob expansion, which happens to also include descending into directories. hilarity ensues. EDIT: I can't seem to figure out how to type * .txt without triggering the italicized formatter, so I had to put a space after the asterisk. urgh.