Re: [Help-bash] Glob star pattern does not match files beginning with a period

[Michael Convey]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 1:19 PM, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 07/15/2015 01:58 PM, Michael Convey wrote:
>
> [top-posting on technical lists makes your responses harder to read]
>

​
​Sorry, my mistake​. I'll be more careful going forward.
​


>
> > ​I've done some more testing of this and found no difference between
> > ​ls -dl .[!.]?*
> > and
> > ls -dl .[!.]*
>
> Then you obviously didn't try it on a file named '.a'.
>
> >
> > In both cases the . directory does not appear in the output. Why doesn't
> ​​
> >
> ​
> ​
> it
> ​ ​
> ​
> appear in the second command? Does [!.] require a second character?


> Yes, [!.] requires a second character.  The trailing ?* then requires a
> third character.  So you have a difference of whether '.a' vs. '..a' vs.
> '...' get accepted, depending on whether you forbid a second dot vs.
> whether you require at least three characters


​That now makes sense, thank you.


> , coupled with a desire to
> not list files twice through two different globs.
>

​I see that now. I do have files listed twice.​ Looks like the following
really is the best way to go:
shopt -s dotglob
ls -dl *
I was trying to see if I could do it without changing that option. What are
the downsides to leaving the dotglob on by default?

>
> Both of these three-glob approaches can be used to obtain all file names
> that are not '.' or '..':
>
> ​​
> ls -d * .[!.]* ..?*
>
> or:
>
> ls -d * .??* .[!.]
>

​I assume you intended and asterisk at the end of the preceding line. ​


>
> but you still have to deal with the fact that unless nullglob  is
> enabled to eliminate a glob that has no matches, you are then passing
> unexpanded globs to ls that may result in listing a valid file name
> twice, or in ls reporting an error about a file not found.
>

​Interesting. When I execute each of the following commands in an empty
directory, i get an error:

ls -d .??*
ls -d ..?*
​
ls -d .[!.]*

​However, if I set nullglob, each of those commands outputs '.' -- which
doesn't seem right. ​


> There is no two-glob pattern that can cover all file names except for .
> and .., unless you resort to bash's extended globs (at which point, you
> might as well do it in a single glob that uses alternation).
>
> ​By alternation, do you mean something like the following:

ls -dl * -o .[!.]*​ -o ..?*

This seems to work perfectly with no duplicate output and dotglob and
nullglob unset.

However, the following produced an error:

ls -dl {*|.[!.]*​|..?*}

I also tried [...], but that errored as well. Is there another fairly
simple way to perform alternation without using extended globs?