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"Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <b...@iguanasuicide.net> writes:
> In <87fx6mkfhn....@merciadriluca-station.merciadriluca>, Merciadri Luca wrote:
>>$ cp *.*
>>is equivalent to
>>$ cd . ; cp *
>
> Not true.
>
> The second misses a file named "foo", as the shell glob "*.*" only matches
> filenames with at least one '.' character in their name.
>
>>$ cp .*
>>is equivalent to
>>$ cd . ; cp *
>
> Again, not true.
>
> The second misses a file named ".foo", as wildcards ('?' and '*' characters)
> in shell globs do not match a '.' character in the first position. (This is
> part of the "hidden" aspect of dot-files.)
>
>>A third case is
>>$ cp .[a-zA-Z0-9]*
>>which is equivalent to copy everything beginning with a dot, and
>>ending with whatever you can imagine.
>
> Again, not true.
>
> The first misses a file named ".$ntfs$protected", as the bracket/range
> expression only catches letters and digits, and may not catch all of them
> depending on the collation settings in the environment.
>
>>Consequently, using
>>$ cp .[a-zA-Z0-9]*
>>
>>and the mere (after or before)
>>$ cp *
>>
>>should copy all the files of a directory to another (they were
>>evidently not specified here, as it is trivial stuff).
>
> I would use (cp {,.[!.]}* "$destination") in shells that do brace expansion
> before filename expansion ("globbing"), e.g. bash and zsh. In other shells,
> e.g. those without brace expansion, I would write it out as (cp * .[!.]*
> "$destination").
>
> An alternative I got in the habit of using instead of remembering the "line
> noise" above is doing (cp -r "$src/." "$destination"), which is, for me,
> semantically closer to what I *mean* than writing something that expands to
> all the entries in the directory.
>
>>I could be wrong for at least one of these facts. If so, we can
>>discuss on it. The syntax is actually weird when one begins to play
>>with special files. For sure.
>
> The various expansions done by the shell and the order they are done in is
> well-documented by the bash info pages, the zsh man pages, and (for POSIX-
> compliant shells) the Single Unix Specification.
>
> They are not necessarily easy to understand, but I wouldn't use the word
> "weird". I think "complex" is a better adjective.
Thanks for these rectifications.
- --
Merciadri Luca
See http://www.student.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~merciadri/
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