Glob matching only returning first match

Question

I'm coding up a sort of custom rm script that I would like to pass wildcard matches to. I have several files in the working directory that would match the wildcard that I'm passing to the script, but I'm only getting one of them back from a simple test case:

sh remove r*

Inside the remove script, I've whittled it down to just

echo $1

Here's the directory contents:

$ ls
file2  file4          newTestFile  remove_engine  restore
file3  fileName_1234  remove       remove_w       restore_engine

And here's what I get back.

$ sh remove r*
remove

I understand that BASH expands the wildcard out even before the script is executed. But why am I not getting all of the files in the directory that match f*?

Answer 1

Pathname expansion, aka globbing, expands a single shell word into multiple. In your case

./remove r*

is entirely identical to running

./remove remove remove_engine restore remove remove_w restore_engine

As you discovered, $1 will be remove because this is the first argument. The rest of the files are separate positional parameters, so $2 will be remove_engine and $3 will be restore.

To process all of the arguments, you use "$@", either in a loop:

for file in "$@"
do
  printf 'One of the matches was: %s\n' "$file"
done

or just directly in commands that also accept multiple parameters:

# Delete all matches
echo rm "$@"