Re: Unexpected "unknown file attribute" error

[Peter Stephenson <pws@tinky-winky>]

Bart Schaefer wrote:
> For obscure reasons, one of the machines I use at work has this function
> in root's .zshrc:
> 
> function add-dir {
>     which=$1
>     shift
>     foreach dir ($*) {
>         eval $which=(\${$which} \$dir)
>     }
> }
> 
> This used to work in 3.0.x, but now that I've installed 4.0.4, it fails with
> 
> add-dir:4: unknown file attribute
> 
> Why isn't the space inside the parens enough to keep them from being treated
> as a glob qualifier?  It used to be.

I think the change is in haswilds() --- so it affects whether globbing
takes place at all, not just qualifiers.  It used to check whether there
were balanced parentheses with interesting-looking characters inside; now
it is triggered just by an open parenthesis.

The change is beyond the reach of CVS, but it may have changed to support
patterns like `foo|bar' in case statements --- they used to get wrapped by
an extra layer of parentheses, but now don't; simplifying the code may
have seemed the easiest bet.

Apart from the annoyance of the incompatibility, I don't see why unquoted
parentheses shouldn't trigger globbing, though --- it saves a lot of rather
picky tests which are hard to keep in line with the main globbing code.
-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 392070