So I couldn't be bothered to work out how 'glob' worked exactly, so I just did an experiment: I created a hacked version of 'rm' that had the directory handling call to glob call 'echo' instead of 'rm'; it also printed 'tried' instead of the actual unlink call, and printed 'cd' when it changed directories. I then set up two subsidiary directors, foo and .bar, with one containing '.foo0 foo1' and the other '.bar0 bar1'. Saying 'xrm -r -f .*' produced this: cd: . -r -f foo xrm xrm.c cd: .. -r -f foo xrm xrm.c cd: .bar -r -f bar1 (This system has /tmp on a mounted file system, which is why the 'cd ..' was a NOP. And a very good thing, too; at one point the phone rang, and it distracted me, and I automatically typed 'rm', not 'xrm'... see below for what happened. No biggie, there were only my test files there. The output lines are "-r -f foo xrm xrm.c" because that's what 'glob' passed to 'echo'.) Saying 'xrm -r -f *' produced this: cd: foo -r -f foo1 xrm: tried xrm.c: tried So apparently 'glob', when presented with '*' , ignores entries starting with '.', but '.*' does not. When I stupidly typed 'rm -r -f .*', it did more or les what I originally thought it would: deleted all the files in all the directories (but only on the /tmp device, because .. linked to the itself in /tmp, so it didn't escape from that volume); leaving all the directories, but empty, except for the files .foo0 and .bar0. So files and inferior directories with names starting with '.' would have escaped, but nothing else. Noel