Re: Help with paths and file sorting

[Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>]

J wrote:
> Suppose you have an array "files" that contain the names of the files
> you want to sort.
> You can just go along the lines of
> tmp=\(\(${(pj:|:)files}\)\)
> files=(${~tmp}(<put here any sort qualifiers you want>))
>...
> But there is a caveat :
> If one of the filenames have a character in it that can be interpreted
> as a pattern for globbing, it will, and that's not what you want. A
> solution to that is to quote the ${files} array with a (q) flag, but
> then spaces in filenames (or any other special char for that) would be
> quoted too in the ${tmp} array, meaning they won't match themselves
> because these quotes are not going to be removed by the ${~tmp}
> construct :/

You can get around this by using eval instead of ~.

eval files="(("${(j.|.)${(q)files}}")(<quals>))"

That's safe because the only part you're not directly in control of,
$files, is fully quoted.  It's probably best if <quals> includes N for
nullglob so that the resulting files array is empty if nothing matches.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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