[rjgray]

1. That's my understanding from the article.

2. I think this is for the situation where the glob doesn't match, and the nullglob shell option is not set. Without that option, a non-matching glob is processed as a regular word. e.g. In an empty directory:

  $ for file in ./*; do echo $file; done
  ./*

Note the glob pattern is printed by the echo statement. The -e test catches this condition.