Why does an aterisk or a line of asterisks as a bash command return "boost_1_69_0: command not found"?

C. Crt

4/25/24, 12:48 PM

I am a bit confused and amusued but I just accidentally pressed my keyboard and typed:

*******************************************

to which my Ubuntu 22 bash returned:

me@pc:~$ *******************************************
boost_1_69_0: command not found

I tried with multple amounts of * and the result is the same.

1 + 0

command-line

bash

Score:3

Ubuntu

Rinzwind

4/25/24, 12:58 PM

See ls -l and you will see "boost_1_69_0" in the list as the 1st alphabetical file or directory.

The amount of *'s does not matter. bash sees the wildcards and tries to execute it for all of the contents of your active directory and then finds out it can not make sense of it.

I have "bin" as the 1st one and it will for me complain about "bin":

rinzwind@schijfwereld:~$ ls -l
total 8
drwxrwxr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 apr 23 11:24 bin
drwx------ 5 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 apr 18 22:19 snap
rinzwind@schijfwereld:~$ *
Command 'bin' not found, did you mean:
  command 'tin' from deb tin (1:2.6.2-1build1)
  command 'ben' from deb ben (0.10.1ubuntu1)
  command 'bing' from deb bing (1.3.5-5)
  command 'bip' from deb bip (0.9.3-1)
  command 'win' from deb wily (0.13.42-1)
  command 'din' from deb din (56-1)
Try: sudo apt install <deb name>

Use set -x if you want more detailed info about what is happening (set +x to revert that).

Oh and this becomes funky if you had done:

./*

and have this inside "1":

rinzwind@schijfwereld:/discworld/tmp$ cat 1
#!/bin/bash
rinzwind@schijfwereld:/discworld/tmp$ ./*
rinzwind@schijfwereld:/discworld/tmp$

and it will execute it ;)

+ 1

C. Crt

4/25/24, 1:33 PM

You're right! I forgot to check the content of the directory I was in. Thank you and sorry for the stupid question.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Why does an aterisk or a line of asterisks as a bash command return "boost_1_69_0: command not found"?

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