Bizarre redirection failure

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

I've been noticing this curious problem for some time,  and
thought that someone on this list might have.  Consider the
two commands from my tcsh history file:

   317  11:20   make test > & test.log &
   337  11:22   make test > & test_log &

The first of these produces no output at all.  The test.log
file doesn't appear (in any directory apparently). However,
the command does run, and  the  results  of  the  make  are
created.   The  only problem is that "test.log" seems to be
replaced with "/dev/null".

The second command works like I'd expect. The test_log file
appears  and  contains  all the stdout and stderr text from
the make.

The only difference between the two commands really is  the
'.'  versus  the  '_' in the output file name.  Running the
commands in the foreground doesn't affect the  results;  it
just  means  I  have to use a different xterm to see what's
happening.

I've tried this on several flavors of linux, and  the  same
failure  seems  to  happen  everywhere.   I  also have some
accounts on FreeBSD systems, where I  also  use  tcsh,  and
both  commands work like I'd expect there.  It doesn't seem
likely that linux  could  subvert  tcsh's  syntax  or  file
handling, but that does seem to be what's going on.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing special about '.'  in
the  rest of tcsh, and other file names with dots work just
fine, like you'd expect.