Re: ** bug?

Re: ** bug?

[Hariharan Dhandapani]

@>From zefram@dcs.warwick.ac.uk Mon Sep 18 19:23 PDT 1995

@>No, it's not a bug.  ** is supposed to recurse, but not through
@>symlinks.  Hence, it doesn't follow the symlinks, and in this case
@>matches nothing.  ***/*.c would do what you want, as *** recurses in a
@>similar manner to ** but following symlinks.
@>
@>-zefram

Thanks for all your responses, "***" does work and does what i want it
to do, however what is the rationale behind differenitating symbolic
links, why doesn't "**" itself follow symbolic links too, it is very
difficult to write a generic script(without the proper knowledge of
whether one will hit symbolic links or not!)

Thanks,
-hari

Re: ** bug?

[Chip Salzenberg]

According to Hariharan Dhandapani:
> Thanks for all your responses, "***" does work and does what i want it
> to do, however what is the rationale behind differenitating symbolic
> links, why doesn't "**" itself follow symbolic links too ...

Following symlinks is a dangerous policy.  You'll note that "find"
and similar commands usually don't follow symlinks unless they're told
to.  Consider:

  $ mkdir infinite
  $ cd infinite
  $ ln -s .. loop

Now if you follow symlinks, you have infinite/loop/infinite/loop/...
-- 
               Chip Salzenberg, aka <chs@nando.net>
        "Hey, it's the Miss Alternate Universe Pageant!"
          -- Crow T. Robot, MST3K: "Stranded In Space"

Re: ** bug?

[Mark Borges]

>> Hariharan Dhandapani(HD) wrote on Mon, 18 Sep 1995 19:09:29 +0800:
HD> seems like there is a bug with the ** operator:
HD> $ ls
HD> api@    poll@
HD> api and poll are actually pointers to directories
HD> $ ls **/*.c
HD> zsh: no matches found: **/*.c

HD> what gives? isn't this a bug?

No, it's documented to work this way -- see zshexpn(1)  (or search for
`**' if using an older version of zsh).

To get what you want, use the form ***/*.c

  -mb-

** bug?

[Hariharan Dhandapani]

seems like there is a bug with the ** operator:

$ ls
api@    poll@

api and poll are actually pointers to directories

$ ls **/*.c
zsh: no matches found: **/*.c

$ ls */*.c
api/net_addr.c  api/net_prop.c  api/ng_ep.c     poll/pb_errs.c  poll/poll_sig.c

what gives? isn't this a bug?

Thanks,
hari