You're really asking two questions, but both speak to how the shell treats the character "*". That character has special meaning to the shell, and as you discovered, it acts as a particular form of regular expression known in the shell man pages as a glob for file names. That's why you got the list of file names in your current directory, It is supposed to that. Refer to the shell man page section on globbing for a detailed description of all the forms of that particular kind of regular expression syntax.

The second part of question seems to be asking how to avoid that from happening. There are two ways. Either escape the character by preceding it with a back slash '', or put it in single quotes, ie. '*'.

You're really asking two questions, but both speak to how the shell treats the character *. That character has special meaning to the shell, and as you discovered, it acts as a particular form of regular expression known in the shell man pages as a glob for file names. That's why you got the list of file names in your current directory, It is supposed to that. Refer to the shell man page section on globbing for a detailed description of all the forms of that particular kind of regular expression syntax.

The second part of question seems to be asking how to avoid that from happening. There are two ways. Either escape the character by preceding it with a back slash \, or put it in single quotes, ie. '*'.