Benjamin Pflugmann wrote:
Damn, I've been spending too much time in Perl (which also globs, but in which "?" is also a regexp for substitution and interpolation (which I also tend to get mixed up). Hold on ... regexps interpolate, globs substitute. Or was it subs regulate, regglobs expulate, or ...Like you think you're in /mnt/windows/My\ Documents\Downloads and you want to delete a bunch of junk directories with names like ???sefdljvn5+5, ???fdsre8344 etc., so you type "rm -Rf ./?*" Just after you hit Enter you realise that (a) you were in /usr and (b) "?" is a regular expression.
Minor nitpit: You mean shell pattern / globbing. Most shells don't understand regular expressions. If it was a regular expression, "?" would make the "/" optional and "*" would repeat that 0-n times, so ".", "./", ".//", ".///", etc. would match.
Btw, at least bash and tcsh support a nice feature. When your cursor is at the end of the pattern, press "^X-*" (that is: press and hold CTRL and press x, then let go of CTRL, press * - that is: SHIFT-8 for american keyboard, I think). This will expand the pattern in-line and you can see without hitting return, which files match. I never use rm together with patterns without this trick anymore and never have deleted a file accidently since then (quite some years...).
Nice trick - didn't know about that one. There again, it was years before I stumbled on Ctrl-U and Ctrl-D.
Sir Robin
--
" Like these cutters, and hackers, who will take the wall of men, and picke quarrells."
- G. Pettie
Robin Turner
IDMYO
Bilkent Univeritesi
Ankara 06533
Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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