Short-circuiting array-subscript glob qualifier?

Short-circuiting array-subscript glob qualifier?

[Shawn Halpenny]

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Let's say I have a directory /foo/bar that contains a large number of files 
and subdirectories. When I do this:

echo /foo/bar/**/^*,v(.[1,3])

I want it to echo the first three matching non-,v plain files. 
Unfortunately, zsh still retrieves all filenames that match the glob. How 
possible is it to have the glob stop as soon as the first 3 matches are 
found? I realize that other qualifiers could affect this (for example, if 
you wanted the last 3, clearly, the whole glob has to be completed; if you 
used 'o' or 'O' to sort, you might still have to glob everything). Perhaps 
this isn't worth the effort or is quite difficult, but it's sure handy for 
large directories wherein you only need a well-defined subset of the files 
that isn't controlled solely by the glob expression.

-- 
Shawn Halpenny

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Re: Short-circuiting array-subscript glob qualifier?

[Bart Schaefer]

On May 3, 10:26am, Shawn Halpenny wrote:
} 
} echo /foo/bar/**/^*,v(.[1,3])
} 
} I want it to echo the first three matching non-,v plain files. 
} Unfortunately, zsh still retrieves all filenames that match the glob.

Yep, that's right.  All qualifiers that work on the file names (rather
than on the filesystem attributes) are applied once to the entire list
after the glob is done.  Well, that's not quite right -- expressions
evaluated with (e:...:) are applied to each file as it is found, too,
but there's no provision for that to short-circuit the entire glob.

} How possible is it to have the glob stop as soon as the first 3
} matches are found?

Can't be done using glob patterns.