Re: zmv exits from function

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

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On 2023-12-30 13:15, Mikael Magnusson wrote:
> You can also do this:
>    { zmv '(*).SNT' '$1.eml' } always { TRY_BLOCK_ERROR=0 }

Sheesh, of course I'm no expert, still I've never seen any such 
construction before.  Always new domains of syntax to study.  So when 
zmv quits, crashing out of the function is not immediate -- there is 
further parsing, thus this 'always' word is handled. Interesting.

On 2023-12-30 12:38, Bart Schaefer wrote:

> Arguably zmv could use null_glob.  Thoughts from -workers?

That's that option that makes everything grind to a halt if nothing if found?

> No, you're thinking of nomatch, which as I said is already in effect
and causing the result that you see.  The null_glob option supersedes
no_match and makes globs that don't match anything disappear without
an error.

Yeah, for some unknown reason I said it backwards -- I know that (N) smooths continuation of flow, it doesn't break it.

> This is in contrast to the no_nomatch option which leaves
the glob un-expanded but does not remove it.

I've run into that, and it can be ugly -- literal asterisks being fed to some command that doesn't want them.  It's good to understand what's going down there.

   Setting null_glob
globally can be dangerous because it can leave a command with no
arguments at all or with its arguments in a different order than
expected.

Yes, another potential landmine.  What might be intuitive is some way of simply making a command 'stop', but that might not be so simple -- something that holds it's place, but has no value -- it 'counts' as an argument but has no content.  It's so dumb when: "ls no-such-files.*" ends up listing everything in the directory rather than nothing.  Dunno who thought that was a good idea.


>  zmv -n '(*/)#(*).(SNT|MES)' '$1$2.eml'

If that looks like it would do the right thing, remove the "-n".

I'll give it a go.  So much can be done with all that globbing functionality.  Such power.  But I can never remember that tersest of all terse syntaxes -- gotta make myself a cheat sheet including a page full of examples.


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