Strange behaviour of the "cd" command

[Dr Rainer Woitok]

Joel,

On Thursday, 2017-07-13 06:59:58 +0900, you wrote:

> ...
> Also, I have vague memories of dot itself being one of the pattern
> matching characters in one of the shells,

No.  Dot is one of the  special characters  used in REGULAR EXPRESSIONS,
but not in SHELL patterns.

> ...
> Ultimately, some professors did not recommend csh for scripts. Too
> many things you couldn't predict reliably.

They were  perfectly right.   Just search  the web for  "Csh Programming
Considered Harmful".

> ksh is a descendant of csh.

No.   The descendant of "csh"  was called "tcsh".   The Korn Shell is in
fact Bourne Shell compatible in that you can run Bourne Shell scripts in
it, but whether this makes it a descendant of the Bourne Shell is debat-
able.   Just by its  name the Bash Shell  ("Bourne Again Shell") regards
itself a Bourne Shell descendant,  even though it added  plenty of feat-
ures already found in the Korn Shell.

Sincerely,
  Rainer