A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
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A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
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Re: A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
#2I also have the habit of always using -iname instead of -name to make case insensitive searches.
Re: A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
#3Shell (because this is technically a shell, not a find issue) is the worst language that everyone should learn. It's a language you'll actually encounter, and it's one that's hard to avoid (unlike PHP).
Re: A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
#4Phew! I'm glad I've been hitting the "Happy Case" scenario all these years!
Very useful article. And very informative.
Summary:
Instead of -
find . -name *.jpg
find . -name '*.jpg'
Re: A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
#5I wonder if this is also a problem with fish. The globing there is different.
Re: A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
#6I also have the habit of always using -iname instead of -name to make case insensitive searches.
I used to do this until just replacing it with `fd`.
Re: A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
#7Common? Yes. Simple enough to stop doing this mistake after two times? Also yes. One you internalize in which case shell is responsible for globbing and in which case command itself, it is pretty clear cut.
Re: A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
#8I wonder if this is also a problem with fish. The globing there is different.
Fish basically forces you to single quote commands that contain wildcard characters.
Re: A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
#9This was obvious to me, but one version of this that surprised me is when using scp. If you glob a remote destination like "scp myserver:*.jpg ./" It will probably work! But how? Because the remote path will likely not match any local files and the path with the asterisk will be passed to scp and scp will do the globbing on the remote side.
Re: A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
#10I often set the nullglob option in scripts, because it makes the handling of globs which don't match anything a bit more predictable:
http://bash.cumulonim.biz/NullGlob.html
There's a note at the end about how with nullglob set, ls on a glob with no matches does something surprising. This is a great illustration of how an empty list and the absence of a list are different. Sadly it's rather hard to make that distinction in shells!
I do wish that either shells had a more explicit syntax for globbing, or other commands didn't use the same syntax for patterns. Then confusion like this couldn't occur. An example of the former would be if you had to write:
ls $(glob *.txt)