~$ mkdir testdir~$ cd testdir~/testdir$ touch -- -e \\141~/testdir$ ls-e \\141~/testdir$ Echo *a~/testdir$ note i used '--' with touch so '-e' would not be used as an option.So what happened here?-e was passed to echo as an option. echo * becomes echo '-e' '\141' which interpreted correctly the \141 escape sequence as 'a'If you're going to use * be careful. Avoid echo try printf.In this case: ~/