How does `*\ *` work in bash?

There is an answer from SuperUser , which renames filenames containing whitespace: for f in *\ *; do mv "$f" "${f// /_}"; done The part I don't understand is *\ *. The author wrote that: > *\ * selects all files with a space in their name as input for the the for loop. The pattern *X* selects all files with X in their name, and for the special character space, we have to escape it with a slash so that bash doesn't treat it as separating different arguments. Since * does not match a space, why does *\ * also match files with multiple space character when it only has one space in it?