Why /**/*/ rather than just /**/ ? The extra /*/ there will expand symbolic links, which are normally skipped by /**/.
I just now realized that.
... so by expanding that you're traversing the whole filesystem again, which takes you back to /proc/ again, and so on for every PID until zsh gives up (probably because it can't allocate any more memory).
It had that looping feeling. Didn't realize that it was crashing tho, I thought it was actually finishing.
I suspect previously you weren't adding that extra /*/. What do you mean for that to accomplish?
% echo /**/*/etc/r*(/N) #BAD
% echo /**/*etc/r*(/N) #GOOD
... at some point the '/' got added, don't know. I just missed it.
All good. Man, what a strange adventure tho.
> There's no glob qualifier for that, if that's what you mean. As it
happens, those directories always appear to be empty, so you can find
them with /*(/L0)
Ok I'll look at that. Mind, the above has solved the problem. Still one might save a millisecond avoiding searches of those virtual directories -- or not.
> Without trying it, which I'm not going to do, I think the answer to
your specific question might be:
echo /**/^(proc|sys)/etc/r*(N)
Hangs. Never mind!