How to type an asterisk on Linux

Unicode input with Ctrl + Shift + U

1. Press Ctrl + Shift + U. An underlined u appears.
2. Type the hex code, for example 2731 for ✱.
3. Press Space or Enter.

This works in GNOME and anywhere IBus is the input method. On KDE Plasma it depends on your input method: IBus supports it, while Fcitx 5 uses its own Unicode picker (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + U by default).

Search for asterisks with a character app

GNOME's Characters app and KDE's KCharSelect both let you search by name. Search asterisk, click the one you want, and copy it. Or copy straight from our symbols list.

Typing * in the terminal

In shells like Bash and Zsh, an unquoted * is a wildcard that expands to every file name in the folder. The asterisk in Bash explains exactly what it matches. To pass a literal asterisk to a command, quote it or escape it:

echo '*'        # prints *
echo "\*"       # prints \*  (the backslash is kept inside double quotes)
echo \*         # prints *
grep '\*' notes.txt   # finds lines containing an asterisk

In grep and other tools that use regular expressions, * also means "repeat the previous character", so it needs a backslash to match a real asterisk. See the asterisk in regex.