unexpected wildcard issue

unexpected wildcard issue

[Atom Smasher]

### create some "xyz" file
$ touch {1..10}.xyz

### check that they're there, using a wildcard
$ ls  *xyz
0.xyz	1.xyz	10.xyz	2.xyz	3.xyz	4.xyz	5.xyz	6.xyz	7.xyz 
8.xyz	9.xyz

### create another file with a leading dash in the filename
$ touch ./-11.xyz

### check again, with a wildcard
$ ls  *xyz
ls: illegal option -- .
usage: ls [-ABCFGHILPRSTWZabcdfghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]

:::::::::::

should the shell protect expanded file names, as if they were entered in 
quotes?


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Re: unexpected wildcard issue

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Mar 07), Atom Smasher said:
> ### create some "xyz" file
> $ touch {1..10}.xyz
> 
> ### check that they're there, using a wildcard
> $ ls  *xyz
> 0.xyz	1.xyz	10.xyz	2.xyz	3.xyz	4.xyz	5.xyz	6.xyz	7.xyz
> 8.xyz 9.xyz
> 
> ### create another file with a leading dash in the filename
> $ touch ./-11.xyz
> 
> ### check again, with a wildcard
> $ ls  *xyz
> ls: illegal option -- .
> usage: ls [-ABCFGHILPRSTWZabcdfghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]
> 
> :::::::::::
> 
> should the shell protect expanded file names, as if they were entered
> in quotes?

Doesn't matter.  Even if quoted, ls would still see as its first
argument something starting with a dash, which it will interpret as an
option.  Use "ls -- *xyz" or "ls ./*xyz" to ensure that none of the
expanded filenames get mistaken for options.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com

Re: unexpected wildcard issue

[Atom Smasher]

On Wed, 7 Mar 2007, Dan Nelson wrote:

> Doesn't matter.  Even if quoted, ls would still see as its first 
> argument something starting with a dash, which it will interpret as an 
> option.  Use "ls -- *xyz" or "ls ./*xyz" to ensure that none of the 
> expanded filenames get mistaken for options.
==================

ok... so, should the shell insert an implied "--" before expanding 
wildcards or globs? is there an option for that? should there be?

thanks...


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Re: unexpected wildcard issue

[Bart Schaefer]

On Mar 8, 12:12am, Atom Smasher wrote:
}
} ok... so, should the shell insert an implied "--" before expanding 
} wildcards or globs? is there an option for that? should there be?

There was a long, not-quite-heated discussion of this on the POSIX
standards list ("austin-group") late last year.

The end result of the discussion was that David Korn (as in ksh)
suggested that this should be a line editor operation; that is, you
type some key sequence, and the line editor finds the place between
the rightmost word that starts with a hyphen and the leftmost word
that does not, and inserts "--" there.  I believe PWS even wrote a
function for this and sent it to zsh-users.

No, I'm wrong; I'm thinking of zsh-users/10793, which is for a similar
but not quite identical problem.  However, it should be easy to adapt
that function to do this.