I'm pretty new to Unix so please bear with me a bit. I have a question about the * character at the end of a directory path in a bash script.I have a script that's supposed to automatically delete some archives from a server once they get old enough. The script is on machine A and I need to run it on machine B. I access both machines remotely through ssh (no sudo, just regular user). One of the rules of the script is that it needs to only delete archives in the folders beginning with dirA/dirB/dirC/dirD/dirE*. However, there is no dirE in that location so I'm guessing the * stands for some variable. This is what I'd like to know, what does the * mean at the end of the directory path and what does it make the script do?
* at end of directory path
bash;scripting;directory;path
The * here is a globbing character and means match 0 or more characters. To illustrate, consider this directory:$ lsdirA  dire  dirE  dirEa  dirEEE$ echo dirE*dirE dirEa dirEEEAs you can see above, the glob dirE* matches dirE, dirEa and dirEEE but not dirA or dire (*nix systems are case sensitive).So, in your script, that means it will delete archives from any directory in dirA/dirB/dirC/dirD/ whose name begins with dirE.