[svlug] Quick shell question

[Tim Pepper]

On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, Ivan Passos wrote:

> 
> On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, Ray Olszewski wrote:
> 
> > >I have a file called -C . How do I delete this file??
> > >
> > >As y'all know, 'rm -rf -C' doesn't cut it ... ;)
> > 
> > Does "rm -i *C" work?
> 
> No, it doesn't:
> 
> $ rm -i *C
> rm: invalid option -- C
> Try `rm --help' for more information.
> $
> 
> It reads the '-C' argument anyway.

As it should...

The shell does expansion, so "rm -i *C" will get expanded to 'rm -i -C' and rm
will see the -C as an attempt at an argument.

I was soooo stumped by something like this the other day.  Had a shell script
invoked as "foo *.foo" and wanted to get "*.foo" inside the script and was
just using $1 in the script.  The code only ever ran against one file.  After
an embarassingly long time I realised that *.foo was expanded into all the
matching patterns which then came in on $1, $2, ...

t.

--
*********************************************************
*  tpepper at vato dot org             * Venimus, Vidimus, *
*  http://www.vato.org/~tpepper     * Dolavimus         *
*********************************************************