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 ]