Re: file globbing

[Kaz Kylheku <kaz at ashi dot footprints dot net>]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, James Lemke wrote:

> Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 10:31:37 -0500
> From: James Lemke <jim@TheLemkes.ca>
> To: cygwin@cygwin.com
> Subject: file globbing
> 
> I've recently noticed a problem with Cygwin ls.  I did a quick search of

It's not ls that does the globbing. That is done by the shell before it
runs ls.

> the archives, but didn't get any hits.  Has anyone else seen this?
> Try: ls -dl ../tcl[7-9]*
> Result on Linux: ../tcl ../tcl8
> Result on Cygwin: ../tcl8
> 
> That is, on Cygwin tcl[7-9]* does not match tcl.  I think it should.

It should not. Shell regular expressions for globbing filenames are not
the same as normal regular expressions. [7-9]* does not mean ``zero or
more occurences of a character in the 7-9 class'' it means ``exactly
one occurence of 7, 8 or 9 followed by zero or more characters''.

Not sure what is going on with the Linux example.

If you are investigating glob behavior, try using echo rather than ls:

  echo ../tcl[7-9]*

If there is any confusion about what is being matched due to leading,
trailing or embedded whitespace, try this:

  for x in <pattern>; do echo "<$x>"; done

Then you get each matching name, in angle braces, on a separate line.

> I have upgraded to the latest coreutils and still see the problem.
> Comments?

The only apparent problem is on the Linux side, where a pattern that
calls for a digit in the range 7-8 seems to be matching a name that
contains no such thing.

It does look like the shell you are using on Linux is interpreting the
pattern as a full regular expression.

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