[koenigdavidmj]

If you want to blow away a directory, do this just to avoid wildcard games:

  rm -rf $the_dir && mkdir $the_dir

Yes, it's technically slower, but this is shell.

[perturbation]

Should mkdir be first (so that it short circuits if $the_dir is unset?) I haven't done anything in bash in a while but that seems to be how it works on my computer (Debian Wheezy, bash 4.2.37).

[koenigdavidmj]

The original broken code was using a wildcard to clear a directory. I proposed a safer way of doing that: delete the directory itself then recreate it.