Is the expansion of a wildcard in BASH guaranteed to be in alphabetical order? I forced to split a large file into [10Mb pieces][1] so that they can be be accepted by my Mercurial repository.

So I was thinking I could use:

split -b 10485760 Big.file BigFilePiece.

and then in place of:

cat BigFile | bigFileProcessor

I could do:

cat BigFilePiece.* | bigFileProcessor

In its place.

However, I could not find anywhere that guaranteed that the expansion of the asterisk (aka wildcard, aka '*' ) would always be in alphabetical order so that .aa came before .ab ( as opposed to be timestamp ordering or something like that ).

Also, are there any flaws in my plan? How great is the performance cost of cating the file together?