Program cannot recognize asterisk(*) as an argument passed from the command line?

[Fong]

I try to pass 3 parameters from the command line to a program.
However, the asterisk(*) cannot be recognized by the Java Interpreter,
unless it is embedded by the double quotes(""). There is no problem
with the other symbols like question mark(?), percentage(%), etc. Why
is it like that? Does anyone know why?

Thanks in advance.

Fong

 

[Michael Borgwardt]

I try to pass 3 parameters from the command line to a program.
However, the asterisk(*) cannot be recognized by the Java Interpreter,
unless it is embedded by the double quotes(""). There is no problem
with the other symbols like question mark(?), percentage(%), etc. Why
is it like that? Does anyone know why?

Most likely * is interpreted as a file wildcard and replaced by a list
of all files in the current directory, while ? (also a file wildcard)
is passed on because there is no file it matches.

 

[Gordon Beaton]

I try to pass 3 parameters from the command line to a program.
However, the asterisk(*) cannot be recognized by the Java
Interpreter, unless it is embedded by the double quotes(""). There
is no problem with the other symbols like question mark(?),
percentage(%), etc. Why is it like that? Does anyone know why?

Read the documentation for your command shell, which recognizes and
processes some special characters before passing them to the
application, which only sees the results of the processed characters.
By quoting or escaping (\*) them, you indicate to the shell that you
want them to be treated as normal characters.

/gordon

 

[Fong]

Most likely * is interpreted as a file wildcard and replaced by a list
of all files in the current directory, while ? (also a file wildcard)
is passed on because there is no file it matches.

Thanks for your information!