Re: zsh tips plea (tip of the day)

[Aaron Davies <agdavi01@louisville.edu>]

On Friday, July 23, 2004, at 07:39 AM, Joakim Ryden wrote:

> Peter Stephenson wrote:
>
>> zzapper wrote:
>>
>>> As this group's been a bit quiet lately, my plea would be for you 
>>> experts to occasionally post a tip, or explain some aspect of zsh.
>
>> The usual way of getting these is to post questions...
>
> OK - here's a question... ;)  What's a really cool thing you have done 
> with zsh recently? Or if you will... a few lines about "how I was able 
> to solve my issue using zsh" (yes, I was a high school teacher in a 
> previous life).

This isn't really recent, but probably the most common thing I do in 
zsh that can't be done anywhere else is use the advanced globbing 
stuff. For instance, I have a (fairly large) directory tree that I use 
to categorize and store incoming files that need to be processed, after 
which they get moved to archival directories through symlinks located 
in each "leaf" directory. Determining whether I have any files waiting 
for processing thus involves doing a recursive check for plain files 
only below the root of this tree. In bash, this would either be a 
significant amount of shell scripting effort or a rather ugly "find" 
command. (I hate find.) In zsh, it's "ls **/*(.)". Isn't that nice?
-- 
     __                      __
    /  )                    /  )
   /--/ __. .__  ______    /  / __. , __o  _  _
  /  (_(_/|_/ (_(_) / (_  (__/_(_/|_\/ <__</_/_)_