scp and globbing in zsh

scp and globbing in zsh

[matt m]

I migrated from bash to zsh about a month ago (loving it) and there is
still one thing I cannot figure out. I would like to be able to use
regex (at least the *) with scp. For example:

$ scp someserver:~/tmp/*.txt  .
$ scp *.txt  someserver:~/tmp/

The first one fails with globbing because it seems to be looking for
~/tmp/*.txt on my local machine instead of the remote machine but the
second command works fine. With no globbing set for scp the first
command works but the second command fails.

I could just put single quotes around the server path to get it to
work with globbing but after many years of bash I am having trouble
getting into the habbit of using single quotes with scp and it get's
pretty frustrating.

Is there a way to get this to work so that both of the above commands
work as expected without having to use single quotes? Thanks for any
input.
-- 
allucid
allucid@gmail.com

Re: scp and globbing in zsh

[Peter Stephenson]

matt m wrote:
> $ scp someserver:~/tmp/*.txt  .
> $ scp *.txt  someserver:~/tmp/
> 
> The first one fails with globbing because it seems to be looking for
> ~/tmp/*.txt on my local machine instead of the remote machine but the
> second command works fine.

Zsh is set by default to report an error when any pattern match fails.
You probably want to pass through any unrecognised patterns to the
command.  You can do that with:

setopt nonomatch

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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Re: scp and globbing in zsh

[matt m]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 18:05:06 +0100, Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com> wrote:
> matt m wrote:
> > $ scp someserver:~/tmp/*.txt  .
> > $ scp *.txt  someserver:~/tmp/
> >
> > The first one fails with globbing because it seems to be looking for
> > ~/tmp/*.txt on my local machine instead of the remote machine but the
> > second command works fine.
> 
> Zsh is set by default to report an error when any pattern match fails.
> You probably want to pass through any unrecognised patterns to the
> command.  You can do that with:
> 
> setopt nonomatch

That's just what I was looking for, thank you. 
-- 
allucid
allucid@gmail.com

Re: scp and globbing in zsh

[Wayne Davison]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 06:05:06PM +0100, Peter Stephenson wrote:
> Zsh is set by default to report an error when any pattern match fails.
> You probably want to pass through any unrecognised patterns to the
> command.  You can do that with:
> 
> setopt nonomatch

That does have the consequence of not telling you when you actually
mistype a local match pattern.  I prefer to leave nomatch set and to
manually quote wildcards that need to be expanded remotely.  You'd
either use quotes or a backslash, like this:

$ scp someserver:tmp/\*.txt .

(Note that the leading "~/" isn't needed since ssh defaults to being in
your home directory.)  Just my 2 cents.

..wayne..

Re: scp and globbing in zsh

[Bart Schaefer]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, matt m wrote:

> $ scp someserver:~/tmp/*.txt  .
> $ scp *.txt  someserver:~/tmp/
> 
> I could just put single quotes around the server path to get it to work 
> with globbing but after many years of bash I am having trouble getting 
> into the habbit of using single quotes with scp

I suspect that you just want "setopt no_nomatch" so that the glob pattern 
is left unexpanded when it doesn't find any matching files.  (You may have 
to "unsetopt null_glob csh_null_glob" as well.)  That's the only way I can
think of that this would do as you seem to expect in bash but not in zsh.

If for some reason you want "nomatch" behavior for other commands but not
for scp, you have to play some games of this sort:

  glob_scp() {
    emulate -L zsh
    array args
    local a
    for a
    do
      if [[ $a = *:* ]]
      then
        args=( $args $a )	# args+=($a) if you have zsh 4.2+
      else
        args=( $args $~a )	# args+=($~a)
      fi
    done
    scp $args
  }
  alias scp='noglob glob_scp'

Re: scp and globbing in zsh

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2004-07-23 10:47:20 -0700, Bart Schaefer wrote:
>   glob_scp() {
>     emulate -L zsh
>     array args
      ^^^^^^^^^^

Shouldn't this be "local -a args" ?

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% validated (X)HTML - Acorn / RISC OS / ARM, free software, YP17,
Championnat International des Jeux Mathématiques et Logiques, etc.
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / SPACES project at LORIA

Re: scp and globbing in zsh

[Bart Schaefer]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> On 2004-07-23 10:47:20 -0700, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> >   glob_scp() {
> >     emulate -L zsh
> >     array args
>       ^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Shouldn't this be "local -a args" ?

Yes, it should, sorry.