In a for loop like this,

for i in `cat *.input`; do
    echo "$i"
done

if one of the input file contains entries like *a, it will, and give the filenames ending in 'a'.

Is there a simple way of preventing this filename expansion?

Because of use of multiple files, globbing (set -o noglob) is not a good option. I should also be able to filter the output of cat to escape special characters, but

for i in `cat *.input | sed 's/*/\\*'`
    ...

still causes *a to expand, while

for i in `cat *.input | sed 's/*/\\\\*'`
    ...

gives me \*a (including backslash). [ I guess this is a different question though ]