Re: zsh lists being used for spam-gathering?

[Andrew Main <zefram@tao.co.uk>]

Sweth Chandramouli wrote:
>	i've been playing recently with the parameter expansion features of ls 

ls doesn't do any parameter expansion.

>in zsh, and have been totally blown away by them.  as far as i can tell, they do 
>almost everything that find can do

I suppose you must be talking about zsh globbing?

>using them (in backquotes) as the input for a for-do loop),

I'm not sure precisely what you mean here, but if you're doing something
like

for f in `ls *(wibble)`

then you should change it to

for f in *(wibble)

which saves a process, and a pipe, and will handle special characters
properly.

>the faster execution of the ls verison be offset by the time to load zsh if i 
>were to make all of my ksh scriptfiles into zsh verisons instead?

Not if you link zsh statically and set its sticky bit.

Really, with demand-loading, particularly if you use zsh's module feature
(3.1+), there shouldn't be a great deal of difference.  I suggest you
experiment.

-zefram