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Re: Inconsistent behavior with comparisons and recursive glob patterns



On 4/30/24 04:14, Alan Wagner-Krankel wrote:
The results of these conditional expressions using recursive glob
operators were unexpectedly different:

[[ f0 = **/f? ]] && print true || print false
false
setopt extendedglob
[[ f0 = (*/)#f? ]] && print true || print false
true

A couple things about [[:

```
Pattern metacharacters are active for the pattern arguments; the patterns  are
the  same  as those used for filename generation, see zshexpn(1), but there is
no special behaviour of ‘/' nor initial dots, and no glob qualifiers  are  al‐
lowed.
```

That last bit about glob qualifiers is out of date since you can now use them to
force filename generation on in [[. but the point is you aren't doing filename
generation in [[ (by default), which is where **/ is shorthand for (*/)#.
pattern matching/globbing is tightly coupled to filename generation in unix shells
but there are difference.

Even when you use a glob qualifier to force filename generation to happen, you
still wasn't going to get the behavior you desired since the pattern would've
underwent filename generation before the comparison that [['s =/== does.

% (set -x; [[ f0 = **/f?(#qN) ]]; touch f2; [[ f0 = **/f?(#qN) ]])
+zsh:3> [[ f0 =  ]]
+zsh:3> touch f2
+zsh:3> [[ f0 = f2 ]]


Since **/ is a shorthand version of (*/)#, it seems like they both
should have returned 'true'. The comparisons behave the same when
there is at least one directory in the path:

[[ d1/f1 = **/f? ]] && print true || print false
true
setopt extendedglob
[[ d1/f1 = (*/)#f? ]] && print true || print false
true

I came across this because it affects the behavior of zmv, via a test
that filters filenames (line 254 in zsh5.9). An example:

mkdir d1 d1/d2
touch f0 d1/f1 d1/d2/f2
print -rl -- **/f?
d1/d2/f2
d1/f1
f0
autoload zmv
zmv -n '**/f?' '$f.txt'
mv -- d1/d2/f2 d1/d2/f2.txt
mv -- d1/f1 d1/f1.txt
zmv -n '(*/)#f?' '$f.txt'
mv -- d1/d2/f2 d1/d2/f2.txt
mv -- d1/f1 d1/f1.txt
mv -- f0 f0.txt

I think both zmv calls should have attempted to update the 'f0' file
in the base directory. Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Awk

I'll leave zmv's implementation for someone else to answer but i suspect the reasoning is similar.




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