Ive been having trouble getting my bash script to accept wildcards when there are multiple arguments, and am just trying to use this with an ls as described below:

Say I have these 4 files in the directory
I essentially have a script like this called test_script
I can get the results I want to obtain by running the script as:
However I need others to use this scripts and normally we dont need to quote things in order to get the wildcards to work

I have tried using $@ (although I really dont know what this does), but can only seem to get that to work properly if there is only one argument given.


Any advice?

Thanks

The wildcards, unless quoted, are being expanded by the user's shell. Your script never sees them, just the multiple file names that result from the expansion. In your case, that can't work since there is no way for the script to know where the first group ends and the next begins, so there's really no good alternative to quoting.

What you're trying to do is prevent bash from doing what it normally does. I think there is no way prevent that.

Preventing Wildcard Expansion / Globbing in Shell Scripts seems to have identified one version of the least objectionable workaround.

Actually that is false, try using find with an asterisk that is unquoted and see if you get the results you want.

Also, it may serve as a good lesson to the 'others' that quoting is in fact necessary for some command / scripts to work correctly.