In BASH, are wildcard expansions guaranteed to be in order?
- by ArtB
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?