* in your commands is expanded by the shell before tar sees them. It also does not expand hidden files.

So when you do admin/* the shell expands to all non hidden files inside admin. Which does not include admin/.htaccess. So tar is never told to archive this file, only the other non hidden files and folders. It will still archive hidden files and folders nested deeper though.

In the second example * expands to admin and the other does which are not hidden at that level. Then tar can open these dirs and recursivly archive all files and folders including the hidden ones.

You can see what commands actually get executed after any shell expansions if you run set -x first. Then set +x to turn that off again.

Here is an example using ls:

$ set -x; ls -A foo/*; ls -A *; set +x
+ ls --color=tty -A foo/baz
foo/baz
+ ls --color=tty -A foo
.bar  baz
+ set +x

You don't need the wildcard, and as others have pointed out, it doesn't include "hidden " dot files by default.

tar -czf ~/package.tgz admin api mobile

Ah yes, one of the biggest bugs-later-turned-design-mistakes of UNIX. This is not tar, this is your shell; you always need to use both * and .* for a wildcard to match all files in directory - e.g. tar czf ~/package.tgz admin/* admin/.* api/* api/.* mobile/* mobile/.*

Thank you all! Over 25 years on Linux and still new learnings to discover...

Probably due to wildcard expansion by the shell. Use dot (.) instead of asterisk (*).

This is potentially a great 'weeder' question for junior Unix admin interviews, as it requires some knowledge about shell globbing and tar dir traversal.

I admit it took me a sec (and a second read) before I got it, so it was a fun "hey what" exercise.

Excellent question.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/40662/what-is-the-setting-in-bash-for-globbing-to-control-whether-matches-dot-files#40663