[ILUG] ls behaviour

[Gavin McCullagh]

Thanks to everyone for this.

gavin at fiachra gavin> shopt -u nullglob

was what I wanted.

Gavin

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, John Tobin wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 11:36:21AM +0000, Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> ? 
> ? Hi all,
> ? 
> ? if I do 
> ? 
> ? ls lattice_*.dat
> ? 
> ? In the normal way I get back everything which matches that pattern.  Great.
> ? However, on the occasion that nothing matches it why do I get a full listing of
> ? the directory?  Why don't I get an empty list or file not found or
> ? something?
> 
> It depends on what arguments ls is given - without an argument you get
> the directory listing. If bash's "nullglob" option is set and no
> matches are found then "lattice_*.dat" is NOT given as an argument to
> ls. If it isn't set "lattice_*.dat" will be given to ls and you'll get
> the file not found error message. "shopt" will tell you whether it's
> set or not.
> 
> ? it's particularly irritating when you do something like
> ?
> ? for i in `ls lattice_*.dat`
> 
> for file in lattice_*.dat; do . . .
> will do what you want.
> 
> ? do
> ? rm $i
> ? done
> ? 
> ? and everything else gets deleted if there isn't a match of lattice_*.dat
> ? 
> ? It just doesn't seem very logical to me.
> ? 
> ? Gavin
> 
> -- 
> John
> "That would preempt a bunch of problems involved in trying to reconstruct
> exactly how the Perl 5 parser thinks, which nobody entirely understands."
> 			Larry Wall, 2001/04/20, perl6-language at perl.org
> "Finger to spiritual emptiness underlying everything." -- How a Japanese C
> manual referred to a "pointer to void".
> 
> -- 
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