What does "$*" at the end of a shell command mean

Question

In a sample shell script, the command was -

. <sourced_file.sh> $*

What does the $* mean? Thanks.

Answer 1

$* expands to all of the arguments that were given to the script in which it appears, or to the current shell function if it appears inside a function.

It's usually incorrect usage though, because it breaks arguments that contain spaces into multiple arguments. More correct is "$@" which preserves the original arguments even if they have spaces in them.