Re: Negative Filename Generation

[Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>]

zzapper wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Apr 2004 18:31:00 +0100,  wrote:
> >> >\ls x!([0-9])*
> >> zsh: no matches found: x!([0-9])*
>
> >Did you read the sentence a few lines above the definition of !(...)
> >that starts
> >
> >       If the KSH_GLOB option is set ...
> >
> >?
> unsetopt KSH_GLOB
> 
> Didn't change anything for me

I was asking whether you'd turned it on, not off.   Try reading the
section (and the phrase I quoted) again.  By the way, the equivalent zsh
syntax is x(^[0-9])*.

However, you will run up against a more subtle problem:  !([0-9]) and
(^[0-9]) don't mean `any character which isn't a single digit', they
mean `any *pattern* which isn't a single digit'.  So if the target
filename is something like x123abc, x will match `x', !([0-9]) will
match the empty string and * will match `123abc'.  This is standard UNIX
behaviour, although more confusing than usual here.

You therefore need to tell it that the * shouldn't begin with digits
either.  Actually, the best way is (almost):

ls x(^[0-9]*)

which matches an x, followed by anything which isn't a string starting
with a single digit.  Unfortunately that looks like a glob qualifier to the
matcher, so you need to tell it it isn't:

ls x(^[0-9]*)(|)

does what you want.  The bit at the end just matches a null string, and
since it has `|' in isn't a glob qualifier.  There are other ways of
doing it, including `setopt no_bare_glob_qual'.

There's no simpler way for patterns in general, but this case (with a
single character) obviously simplifies to:

ls x[^0-9]*

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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