Cygwin and trouble with quote marks

Question

I have an trouble with cygwin and qoutemarks.

This works:

grep FOO /path/to/files\ with\ spaces/*
grep FOO "/path/to/files with spaces/file1.txt"

But this does not:

grep FOO "/path/to/files with spaces/*"  
grep FOO '/path/to/files with spaces/*'

The error messange is: grep: /path/to/files with spaces/*: No such file or directory

It the asterisk interpreted in some special way or am I missing something completely obvious, or is something weird going on.

Answer 1

Are you running inside bash? man bash for the full details.

Basically, wildcard expansion is done by the shell in unix, not by the commands themselves. Let's say that I have four files, a, b, c and d in my folder. set -x tells bash to echo the command it is actually going to attempt to run after it has munged what you typed, so we'll use that here.

$ set -x
$ echo *
+ echo a b c d
a b c d

That line starting + is printed by bash: bash actually passes a b c d to echo. echo never sees the * you typed.

$ echo "*"
+ echo '*'
*

This time you told bash not to do filename expansion on the * by quoting it. Thus echo now sees the *.

As for your original query, try

grep FOO '/path/to/files with spaces/'*