Very Computer

Folks,

I want to put a glob in a variable. Seems feasible, what am i
missing?

Here is what I have:

#!/usr/bin/ksh
Dir=/tmp
Try="*.$$"

for n in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
do
  touch $Dir/file.$n.$$
done

# [ -f $Dir/*.$$ ] && rm $Dir/*.$$ ## What I want to do in a var. used
to rm some tmp files

 [ -f "$Dir/$Try" ] && rm "$Dir/$Try" what im attempting to do

 echo $Dir/$Try  Gives me the correct list ...
 ie. /tmp/file.1.1001 /tmp/file.2./1001 ...

 and echo "$Dir/$Try"  gives  /tmp/*.$$

As you've discovered, quoting prevents wildcard expansion.  So leave out
the quotes.

--

Level(3), Woburn, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.

Yes... nothing like the obvious to bite you in the a**

     As an aside, note that the glob is not expanded when it is
     assigned to the variable even without the quotes:

$ a=file*
$ echo "$a"
file*
$ echo $a
file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6 file7 file8 file9

Quote:> Yes... nothing like the obvious to bite you in the a**

     Shouldn't that be "in the a??"?

--
    Chris F.A. Johnson                        http://cfaj.freeshell.org
    ===================================================================
    My code (if any) in this post is copyright 2003, Chris F.A. Johnson
    and may be copied under the terms of the GNU General Public License

[...]

Quote:>      As an aside, note that the glob is not expanded when it is
>      assigned to the variable even without the quotes:

> $ a=file*
> $ echo "$a"
> file*
> $ echo $a
> file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6 file7 file8 file9

Yes, but, with ksh, you can expand the pattern into an array.

set -A list -- file*

Note that that doesn't work correctly if there's no matching
file (you "file*" as the only element instead of no element).

  something with "$file"
done

--
Stphane

One thing to watch out for is system differences w.r.t quote characters
within the variable when doing filename expansion from a variable, eg;

$ touch 'file\\'
$ a='file\*'
$ set -x
$ : $a

On some systems the last line will match the file 'file\\' because
the variable $a is interpreted as a filename pattern for example in
pdksh and NetBSD/sh you get;

+ : file\\

On other systems the backslash actually protects the file pattern '*'
so for example in bash you get;

+ : 'file\*'

Another problem with putting entire patterns in variables is with
ksh brace expansion (also done after the variable substitution),
e.g (pdksh);

$ a='a{1,2}*'
$ touch 'a{1,2}'
$ set -x
$ : $a
+ : a1* a2*
$

Oh, and I think the OP meant 'ankle' Chris - then his pattern would
match perfectly :)

seeyafrom
l