🐚 What Happens When You Type ls *.c in the Terminal?

May 14, 2025

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Abdullah alshebel

If you’re new to the command line, you might be scratching your head when someone types something like:

ls *.c

What does that even mean? What is ls? What’s that little star doing? And why does it matter?

Let’s walk through step-by-step what’s happening behind the scenes—like a detective solving a mystery.

Scene 1: The Shell Enters the Chat

Before anything runs, your shell (like bash, zsh, etc.) is the real MVP. It’s the program that reads your command and makes sense of it.

When you type:

ls *.c

The shell, not the ls command, is the one who notices the asterisk (*) and goes, “Aha! That’s a wildcard!”

Step-by-Step Breakdown

Step 1: Wildcard Expansion (aka Globbing)

The * is a wildcard. It means “match anything.”

*.c means: “Match all files that end in .c“

So, if your directory has:

main.c
test.c
script.py
notes.txt

The shell will expand *.c into:

main.c test.c

Key point: The shell replaces *.c with a list of matching filenames before it runs ls.

Step 2: Executing the `ls` Command

Now the shell runs:

ls main.c test.c

This tells the ls command to list info about those specific files.

So the terminal might output:

main.c  test.c

If you want detailed info (like file sizes), you could do:

ls -l *.c

Which expands and runs:

ls -l main.c test.c

What If There Are No `.c` Files?

If there are no files ending in .c, the shell might just pass the literal *.c to ls, depending on your shell settings.

You’ll then see:

ls: cannot access '*.c': No such file or directory

Boom. Shell said, “I couldn’t find anything, so I left it as-is.”

Real World Examples

Example 1: List all `.c` files

ls *.c

Output:

main.c  utils.c

Example 2: Combine with other wildcards

ls *test*.c

Matches files like:

unit_test.c  test_cases.c

Example 3: Use quotes (prevents wildcard expansion!)

ls "*.c"

This is not the same. With quotes, the * is not expanded. It looks for a file literally named *.c.

Bonus Tip: Globbing Is Everywhere

Wildcards (*, ?, etc.) work with lots of commands, not just ls:

cp *.txt backup/
rm *.log
cat data_??.csv

They’re part of shell globbing, and it’s powerful once you get used to it!

TL;DR

When you type ls *.c:

The shell sees the * and expands it to match filenames.
It runs ls with those filenames as arguments.
You see the list of files that match *.c.

And that’s it! You’re officially smarter than 80% of first-year CS students. Okay, maybe 60%.