Weird problem with function ls or system("ls...")

[John W. Eaton]

On 28-Jul-2009, Christian Weickhmann wrote:

| John, you are totally right, I'd expect such a behaviour, too. But on my 
| Ubuntu system ls * gives an empty set and ls *a* gives "ls: cannot access *a* 
| ...".
| 
| Believe it or not, I just confirmed this strange behaviour on a second Ubuntu-
| PC.

What does

  ls --version

tell you?  (I see ls (GNU coreutils) 7.4).  If you think the
difference you are seeing is a bug, then I'd suggest reporting the
problem to the maintainers of the ls program you are using.

jwe