Re: [9fans] Ugly hack

[John Kodis <kodis@tux.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

In article <20030215174605.I9084@cackle.proxima.alt.za>, Lucio De Re wrote:

>  I've found the ability to limit shell command line argument expansion
>  (only in English can one write something so succintly and so ugly) to
>  directories rather than all directory entries by suffixing the last
>  part with a "/".  This is normal behaviour in the NetBSD shells.

You could say this in an even uglier and more succinct fashion by
writing "globbing" instead of "shell command line argument expansion".

>  broken! echo rdesk*
>  rdesktop-1.1.0 rdesktop-1.1.0.tar
>  broken! cd rdesk*/
>  broken! pwd
>  /usr/lucio/Projects/Sundry/rdesktop-1.1.0

While I recognize that this would be a generally useful mechanism, in
this particular case, I'd just use filename completion: I'd type "cd
rdesk<TAB>", this gets completed to rdesktop-1.1.0, I hit return and
I'm done.

If you're interested in prior art in this area, you may want to look
over the man page for zsh glob qualifiers at
http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/zsh_13.html#SEC62

In zsh, *(/) expands to all directories, *(*) expands to a executable
plain files, *(W,X) expands to all world-writable or world-executable
files, and the complexity spirals rapidly out of control from there.

--
John Kodis                                    Goddard Space Flight Center
kodis@mail630.gsfc.nasa.gov                      Greenbelt, Maryland, USA