Re: globbing in conditional expressions

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On May 15,  9:29am, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
} Subject: Re: globbing in conditional expressions
}
} Bart Schaefer wrote on Wed, May 14, 2014 at 00:18:19 -0700:
} > Do I read correctly that "shortcircuit" also means "don't return any
} > file names, just return an indication of whether there is such a file"
} > ??  (Since you don't allocate the matchbuf array when shortcircuit.)
} 
} Of course.  As soon as you find a single matching filename you return to
} the caller, so there are two options: either return just a boolean, or
} return the first matching filename in readdir() order (via $REPLY, as in
} Roman's post).  I'm not sure how idiomatic it would be for a [[ -x ]]
} condition to set $REPLY.

I would not suggest that [[ -m ... ]] set $REPLY, but why does -m have
to be the only place where short-circuiting occurs?  I could imagine
adding a globbing flag (#X) [where I'm using X as a placeholder rather
than a suggestion for the actual flag] which means that the glob returns
only the first matching file it stumbles upon.

In fact if you had that flag you wouldn't need -m as a condition op, it
would suffice to do [ ! -z pat(NX) ].  The implementation also would not
need to change the call signatures of any of the C functions ...