Pattern: Possible grep misuse
Issue: -
In globs, * matches any number of any character.
In regex, * matches any number of the preceding character.
grep uses regex, not globs, so this means that grep '*foo' is nonsensical because there's no preceding character for *.
If the intention was to match "any number of characters followed by foo", use '.*foo'. Also note that since grep matches substrings, this will match "fishfood". Use anchors to prevent this, e.g. foo$.
This also means that f* will match "hello", because f* matches 0 (or more) "f"s and there are indeed 0 "f" characters in "hello". Again, use grep 'f' to find strings containing "f", or grep '^f' to find strings starting with "f".
Example of incorrect code:
grep '*foo*'Example of correct code:
grep 'foo' # or more explicitly, grep '.*foo.*'If you're aware of the differences between globs and regex, you can ignore this message.