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up vote 8 down vote favorite
2
 
~$ echo $(ls)  
arguments.txt cecho.sh Desktop Documents Downloads example.txt Music Pictures Public     
~$ echo $(ls "*.txt")  
ls: cannot access *.txt: No such file or directory

Why does the 2nd subshell command fails?

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2 Answers

up vote 16 down vote accepted

Remove the quotes around *.txt and it should work. With quotes shell will look for the literal filename *.txt. To explore/experiment, try creating a file with name *.txt as touch '*.txt' and repeat the command.

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Note that double quotes (at least in bash and similar shells like zsh) are not the same as single quotes! For example, parameter expansion ($foo) is done inside double quotes, but not single quotes. –  Blacklight Shining 4 hours ago
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up vote 17 down vote

In the same way that you can't run ls "*.txt" in a normal shell, you can't run it in a subshell either. When you put *.txt in quotes, you made ls search for a literal file called *.txt when instead you should be doing this:

$ echo $(ls *.txt) # => file.txt otherfile.txt

A better way to do this is to not use ls at all.

$ echo *.txt # => file.txt otherfile.txt
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+1 for removing the redundant ls. –  Blacklight Shining 4 hours ago
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