I've just noticed this morning that I can't use * wildcard with ls, chown and chmod as user. Works fine as root.

Tried with both bash and sh.

Any ideas what can cause this?

*Edit: root is affected also.

* is a shell wildcard; the shell expands * to the list of all files (not including dot files, by default). The ls, chown, chmod, etc, utilities never see the *.

I'm sure I used to be able to do a 'chmod +w *' in the past. Been a long night...

I can't do a 'mv *.utx ../Temp' for example. Rkhunter doesn't find any problems. Stumped.

Ok it seems that the first filename began with a '-' and this was crapping it out.

Is it just in that one directory? One thing that would cause that is a file name that begins with a dash.

As jimX86 stated, you have a filename in your directory which starts with a hyphen (two hyphens, based on your error message). The wildcard gets expanded to a list of filenames and the ones beginning with hyphens will be interpreted by the command as option switches.

You can disable this switch interpreting (while still expanding wildcards) by including '--' (two hyphens) in your command line (after all the switches actually needed have been specified).

For example:
chmod -v 664 -- --help

would change the mode of a file named "--help". The "-v" is still interpreted as a request for verbose output because it appears before the double-hyphen in the command line. If "-v" appeared after the double-hyphen, it would be considered a filename.

And:
rm -v -- *

would remove all files in the directory, even if one or more of them had a name starting with a hyphen.

Yes that was the problem. Thanks.