Gah, extraneous punctuation marks.  To reiterate, this pattern:

    /^proc

will match everything in the root directory except /proc. And this one:

    /**/etc

will match a directory named "etc" no matter how deep in the file system it
is, such as /foo/bar/baz/zoo/wicky/etc.  Zsh basically has to enumerate
every file on your disk drive to figure out what matches that.

On Sun, Jan 21, 2024 at 1:00 PM Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com> wrote:

> /^proc. will match everything except /proc, so you can easily look for
> files like /^proc/**/whatever.
>
> But on my system which has no /proc, `**` is just as much a culprit, since
> that does a recursive search throughout the entire file system. For
> instance, /**/etc matches /`foo/bar/baz/zoo/wicky/etc` and so on...
>
> On Sun, Jan 21, 2024 at 12:20 PM Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>
> wrote:
>
>> I used to do this kind of thing without any problems:
>>
>>      % echo /**/*/etc/r*(/N)
>>
>> ... but just trying it, zsh labors for close to an hour, then spits out
>> countless pages of:
>>
>> /proc/9/root/etc/rc0.d /proc/9/root/etc/rc1.d /proc/9/root/etc/rc2.d
>> /proc/9/root/etc/rc3.d /proc/9/root/etc/rc4.d /proc/9/root/etc/rc5.d
>> /proc/9/root/etc/rc6.d /proc/9/root/etc/rcS.d /proc/9/root/etc/rsyslog.d
>> /proc/9/task/9/cwd/etc/rc0.d /proc/9/task/9/cwd/etc/rc1.d
>> /proc/9/task/9/cwd/etc/rc2.d /proc/9/task/9/cwd/etc/rc3.d
>> /proc/9/task/9/cwd/etc/rc4.d /proc/9/task/9/cwd/etc/rc5.d
>> /proc/9/task/9/cwd/etc/rc6.d /proc/9/task/9/cwd/etc/rcS.d
>> /proc/9/task/9/cwd/etc/rsyslog.d /proc/9/task/9/root/etc/rc0.d
>> /proc/9/task/9/root/etc/rc1.d /proc/9/task/9/root/etc/rc2.d
>> /proc/9/task/9/root/etc/rc3.d /proc/9/task/9/root/etc/rc4.d
>> /proc/9/task/9/root/etc/rc5.d /proc/9/task/9/root/etc/rc6.d
>> /proc/9/task/9/root/etc/rcS.d /proc/9/task/9/root/etc/rsyslog.d
>>
>> ... I'm wondering why /proc wasn't a problem previously and if there's
>> anything I can do to filter it out of the search -- probably all the
>> Linux 'system' directories too.  I recall that there's some test,
>> something in permissions, some flag -- that identifies these
>> not-quite-real directories -- zsh knows who they are.  They're really in
>> RAM, yes?  I know the tilde is used to make exceptions:
>>
>>      for bb in *.eml~save*; do
>>
>> ... all files matching '*.eml' excepting those that match 'save*' ...
>> but I can't get the syntax correct with the above.
>>
>>      % echo /**/*/etc/r*~/proc*(/N)
>>
>>      % echo /**/*/etc/r*(/N)~/proc*
>>
>> ... were busts.  But the right answer is to filter out all those virtual
>> directories.  Don't know why this didn't used to be a problem.  But I
>> think I did deal with this issue a few years ago, too.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>
>


-- 
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>