Bash – Why doesn’t the command “ ls “*” ” show anything

Short answer: shell glob expansion.

The shell takes your input and expands the .* part before passing it to ls, so effectively you're doing:

$ ls .bash_history .bash_profile .bashrc .coin_history .emacs ...

So it lists each entry. When it sees a directory entry, it lists the contents of that directory, just as you would expect ls to do. To see only the files/directories in your working directory, use the -d option to ls:

$ ls -d .*

The -d option tells ls to "list directories themselves, not their contents" (taken from the lsman page).

I figured it out! Looking more closely at the documentation for shopt, there's an option called dotglob that can be used to include filenames that begin with a dot!

I added shopt -s dotglob to the beginning of my script and it works now. The output now lists every hidden file and directory (except ./ and ../).

My script now looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s extglob
shopt -s dotglob

for i in "$(pwd)"/*; do
  echo "$i"
done