Re: counting trouble

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 11:21 AM, Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:
>
>     tmp=( $1*(N) )
>
>     if [[ "$#tmp" > 1 ]]; then
>
> Alas, if there is only one match then the count becomes a count not of lines
> but of characters which is a nasty gotcha.

That can't be all there is to it.  $#array only becomes a count of
characters if the context forces the array into string form.  Which
admittedly can happen in some non-obvious ways, but what you've shown
above is not one of those ways.  What are you really doing?

> Hacking away I find this works:
>
>     [ -e "$1" ] && tmp=( "${(f)${1}}" ) || tmp=( ${1}*(N) )

Umm ...  [ -e "$1" ] will only succeed for a single literal file name,
not a pattern, and the (f) flag means to split on newlines, so unless
you have a file with newlines embedded in the name (in which case this
is entirely broken a different way) there's no reason for ${(f)...}
there at all.  And none of this has anything to do with how [[ $#tmp >
1 ]] would work after the assignment.

> expected this to work: " ${(f)${1}*} " but it doesn't.

Expected it to do what?  Filename generation like ${1}* out in the
open (so to speak)?  What led you to expect that?  In any case
filename generation would never produce a newline-separated string
(again barring files with newlines in the name), so (f) would not do
anything to the result.

Please don't think about globbing as returning "lines".  It doesn't.