Re: helper function that should take a list argument doesn't do anything

[David Kastrup]

Patrick or Cynthia Karl <address@hidden> writes:

> On Nov 11, 2012, at 9:10 AM, Marc Hohl wrote:
>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2012 09:10:44 +0100
>> From: Marc Hohl <address@hidden>
>> To: address@hidden
>> Subject: Re: helper function that should take a list argument doesn't
>>      do      anything
>> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>> 
>> Am 10.11.2012 14:49, schrieb David Kastrup:
>>> [...]
>>>> -i isn't an option of touch. It is an option of rm. The touch places 
>>>> a file -i in the directory. At least with POSIX sort order, this is 
>>>> bound to come rather early in a directory listing, so if you have 
>>>> files a, b, c in the directory, rm * .o expands into rm -i a b c .o 
>>>> It does not help much if you have a sort order where - gets ignored, 
>>>> obviously. 
>> Hey, that's clever!
>> 
>> Marc
>
> Indeed, it is clever.  However, it doesn't seem to work on a mac
> running OSX 10.7.5.  I find that the command "touch .\-i" creates a
> file called ".-i", which doesn't look like the "-i" option to the rm
> command.

Sure it would.  But I wrote

    touch ./-i

which is quite different.

> I can get it to work with any of these commands:
>
>       touch "-i"

No idea about OSX, but on GNU/Linux this will give you

address@hidden:/usr/local/tmp/lilypond$ touch "-i"
touch: invalid option -- 'i'
Try `touch --help' for more information.

You could try

touch -- -i

instead, but ./-i is simpler.

-- 
David Kastrup