Re: Inconsistent behavior with comparisons and recursive glob patterns

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>]

> On 01/05/2024 08:55 BST Alan Wagner-Krankel <awk@awkwork.com> wrote:
> Thanks - I did miss that **/ wasn't supported in conditional expressions.
> 
> I wonder if there might be some value in making that explicit in the
> documentation, possibly by changing the paragraph you referenced to
> something like this:
> 
>     Pattern metacharacters are active for the pattern arguments. The patterns
>     are the same as those used for filename generation, see zshexpn(1), but
>     there is no special behaviour of `/' nor initial dots, shorthand operators
>     such as **/ are not converted to their expanded forms, and glob qualifiers
>     are only allowed for forcing filenames to be generated as described above.
> 
> There's a slight issue that "such as **/" implies there are many
> shorthand operators; I have no idea if there are any others besides
> **/ and ***/.

That's a sensible suggestion, how about this?  Please do comment further.

pws

diff --git a/Doc/Zsh/cond.yo b/Doc/Zsh/cond.yo
index 000e576..4216f89 100644
--- a/Doc/Zsh/cond.yo
+++ b/Doc/Zsh/cond.yo
@@ -241,7 +241,10 @@ ifnzman(\
 noderef(Filename Generation)\
 )\
 , but there is no special behaviour
-of `tt(/)' nor initial dots, and no glob qualifiers are allowed.
+of `tt(/)' nor initial dot, and the patterns `tt(**/)' and `tt(***/)' behave
+the same as (*/), in which the tt(*) may match one or more `tt(/)' characters.
+Also, no bare glob qualifiers are allowed, though the form `(#q)var(...)' is
+allowed as shown above.
 
 In each of the above expressions, if
 var(file) is of the form `tt(/dev/fd/)var(n)',