Re: Inconsistent behavior with comparisons and recursive glob patterns

[Alan Wagner-Krankel <awk@awkwork.com>]

I think there's some risk that "... '*' may match one or more '/'
characters" could be misinterpreted as "... '*' may *only* match one
or more '/' characters".

Maybe:
the patterns `tt(**/)' and `tt(***/)' behave the same as `tt(*/)',
i.e. as a standard wildcard tt(*) that could match any set of zero or
more characters (including `tt(/)'), followed by a `tt(/)'.



Thanks,
Awk

On Wed, May 1, 2024 at 3:38 AM Peter Stephenson
<p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> > 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)',