Why is the following happening?

mis254@mis254:~> JUNK="/home/mis254/r?belcher"
mis254@mis254:~> echo $JUNK
/home/mis254/r belcher
mis254@mis254:~> JUNK="/home/mis254/r?belchers"
mis254@mis254:~> echo $JUNK
/home/mis254/r?belchers

The first case JUNK is a path to a real file on my system called...
/home/mis254/r belcher
when I echo out JUNK, it will not echo the '?' character
The second case JUNK is not a path to a real file.
when I echo out JUNK this time, it will echo the '?' character.

It appears the echo command is determining my string of chars to
be an actual file. Is this normal?

Does this problem happening continually or was it just a fluke?

Here is my confusion on this:

You echoed an actual directory, meaning:
/home/mis254/r belcher exists. Then you tried to echo a non-existent file/directory:
/home/mis254/r?belchers

So I am guessing Linux saw the actual directory there, and echoed the correct thing, however it couldn't find the actual directory/file to echo for the second, so it returned exactly what you requested?

... I've got no idea in other words

Cool

Not sure what shell/echo you are using,
but in bash it's *not* normal, and it doesn't work that
way, either ;) ... Since anything you put in $JUNK
is just a string of characters it shouldn't (and in
GNU bash, version 2.05a.0(1) doesn't) matter whether
it happens to be a file's name or not :)

Must be a peculiarity of whatever shell/echo
you are using ;)


Cheers,
Tink