Question

How to disallow user input ” * ”

read -p "inputData : " inputData
#user input *

echo $inputData
#here it outputs the current files in the directory... how do we prevent this?

what kind of regular expressions should i check for user input?

here is what i got so far…

count=`echo "$1" | grep -q "[\*\.\+\?]" `

Answer 1

Quote your variable to prevent pathname expansion

echo "$inputData"

Example

$ read -r -p "Gimme input: " ans; echo "You entered >$ans<"
Gimme input: *
You entered >*<

Alternatively, you can turn off globbing by first running set -f in your script

If you do either of these, you don’t need to check for any nasties in the input as long as you’re not running it through eval