When I supply a pattern w/o any glob characters, I get the pattern back, even if no file matches it. Why does Perl's glob do this?

$ echo foo.c
foo.c

$ echo foo.?
foo.?

$ ls foo.c
ls: foo.c: No such file or directory

$ ls foo.?
ls: foo.?: No such file or directory

$ perl -le 'print glob "foo.c"'
foo.c  # shell expansion w/o existence check

$ perl -le 'print glob "foo.?"'
# shell expansion w/ existence check

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Glob's behavior w/o wildcards matches a simple shell expansion, while glob's behavior w/ wildcards matches a file existence test.

Just to make this sting a little, Python's behavior is consistent:

$ python -c 'from glob import glob; print(glob("foo.c"))'
[]

$ python -c 'from glob import glob; print(glob("foo.?"))'
[]

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In reply to a glob w/ no wildcards returns itself by jeberle

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