I seemed to see anomalous behavior for "ls -l R*" but it was
stupidity. The command listed the contents of a subdirectory, the name of which started with R. The subdirectory contained copies of almost all the files of the directory.

I don't know how to delete this thread. Sorry.

No problem. Be careful with those "*"s. I know of a fellow who wanted to remove a "hidden" directory structure from his home directory. Something distracted him, so he typed "rm -rf ." and looked away from his keyboard. When he looked back he accidently hit the "Enter" key. You could hear his scream all the way to the end of the hallway.

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I used to be Tech Support Manager at a small systems house, reselling AT&T Unix systems back when AT&T was still in the computer hardware business.

One of my folks got tasked by the owner of the company to make some changes on a 3B2 system we had sold to a customer. He had a bad habit, acquired while administering a small Xenix system, of always running as root to avoid pesky permissions problems.

So when he got to the customer site, he used the menu driven system administration utility provided on the machine to create an ID for himself with root powers, and used it to make his changes. He then used the system administration menu to remove the ID he had created for himself.

What he didn't know was that unlike the corresponding utility on the 3B1 we had at the office, when you removed an ID on the 3B2 using that utility, it removed the ID, and all directories beneath that ID's home directory. The userid was root equivalent and had / as the home directory.

You guessed it. He wiped the machine.

He then had to reload Unix from the floppy distribution media, restore from the complete tape backup the user had (thank $DEITY) made just before he arrived, and redo his changes, while trying to keep the customer's bright and inquisitive rep staring over his shoulder from realizing what he had just done. (The customer was a doctor's office, and the 3B2 held billing information. The consequences of their not having a backup don't bear thinking upon.)

When he finally got back to the office late that evening and told me what had happened, I said "Now do you understand why I don't like you always running as root? Bet you'll never do that again, right?"

(The systems house went belly up not that long after, and I left before it did, so I don't know whether he actually learned from his mistake. I'd like to think so, but lay no bets...)
______
Dennis

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I think you wished to use something similar to one shown below

ls -l --recursive

I prefer to use long form of options wherever available.

Regards.