Bart Schaefer wrote on Thu, May 15, 2014 at 07:50:03 -0700:
> 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 ...

That turned out to be much less code to implement.  It's attached, if
anyone finds it useful.

I couldn't get it to work via [ -z ], but this works:

% Src/zsh -fc '() { (( $#@ )) } *(NY); echo $?' 
0

% Src/zsh -fc '() { (( $#@ )) } *foobar(NY); echo $?'
1