On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 7:33 AM, <random832@fastmail.us> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 5, 2015, at 13:45, Skip Montanaro wrote:
I only discovered this "shortcoming" (or "Bourne Shell dependency") relatively recently. I've been using bash for so long it never even occurred to me that {...} notation wasn't available in all shells.
Brace expansion is technically not globbing. yen{2,3}.txt will return yen2.txt yen3.txt even if one or both of those files don't exist. The reason it works with globs is that yen{2,3}.* literally expands to yen2.* yen3.* which is then globbed.
Which, by the way, is the main reason I use brace expansion. Type "mv" and then fill in a file name using tab completion, then insert or delete something by editing it to have braces and a comma: mv some-long-file-name-blah-blah-blah mv some-{long-,}file-name-blah-blah-blah Et voila! Remove one word from a tab-completed file name. There's no way that a generic glob expansion tool can do everything that bash does, and I doubt anyone expects it. ChrisA