On Sunday 30 September 2007, Florian Philipp wrote: > Which shell do you use? Bash's default behavior (I don't know whether > you can change that) is that it doesn't expand * to all files and > directories but only the nonhidden. > > Just try the following: > ls -l --directory --all ~/* > > On my system it only shows my a long lost of all directories and files > without a dot at the beginning although, strictly speaking, the > command should show all files, even the hidden ones.
No, it should not (assuming the syntax of your example), unless bash "dotglob" option is on. One thing are the options to ls, another is how the shell expands wildcard characters. In your example, the tilde is expanded to the user's home dir (eg, /home/user), the asterisk is expanded to all the file and directory names under /home/user not starting with ".", so what ls really sees is ls -l --directory --all /home/user/dir1 /home/user/dir2 /home/user/file1 /home/user/file2 etc. Since you gave the "--directory" (aka "-d") option, and "*" expansion does not include names starting with ".", nothing else is printed. The "--all" option does not come into play at all here. A different story would be if you did not use the -d option; then names at first level starting with "." still would not have been shown (because "*" is expanded by the shell before ls sees the names), but directory contents would have been listed including names starting with ".", due to the --all option. Another variation would be not using -d and giving only "~" as pathname to ls (ie, not "~/*"). In that case, ls would see just "/home/user" and the --all option could do its job at the first level, listing all the names, even those starting with ".". The bash option to have "*" expand to all the names, including those starting with ".", is "dotglob" (eg, "shopt -s dotglob). man bash explains it all. > Is it possible that you mean regular expressions and not Bash's > expansion feature? This is possible (well, sort of) enabling the "extglob" option in bash. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
