Meaning of “[–0]” in a glob pattern

wildcards

I was reading about "Glob" and "Globbing Pathnames", and I found this strange (to me) part in man pages:

"[–0]" matches the three characters '-', '.', '0', since '/' cannot be matched.

I am confused! How do two dashes and a 0 match .? What is the role of the / character here? Is this is a bug in man page?

Best Answer

As explained in the beginning of that paragraph in that man page, '-' character, when put between two characters, represents a range of characters, and also, '-' character, when put as first or last character between brackets, has its literal meaning. So, the first dash really means a '-' character, and the second dash is a range specifier. So the whole pattern consists of all the characters between '-' and '0', which, in the C/POSIX locale (but generally not in others) are:

-
.
/
0

and since '/' cannot be matched, the pattern matches three characters '-', '.', '0'.

Related Solutions

Bash Wildcards – Best Way to Expand Glob Pattern

Just let it expand inside an array declaration's right side:

list=(../smth*/)          # grab the list
echo "${#list[@]}"        # print array length
echo "${list[@]}"         # print array elements
for file in "${list[@]}"; do echo "$file"; done  # loop over the array

Note that the shell option nullglob needs to be set.
It is not set by default.
It prevents an error in case the glob (or one of multiple globs) does not match any name.

Set it in bash with

shopt -s nullglob

or in zsh with

setopt nullglob

Bash – Configure bash globbing

Unfortunately, I must answer my own question. It was GLOBIGNORE. From the man page:

A colon-separated list of patterns defining the set of filenames to be ignored by pathname expansion. If a filename matched by a pathname expansion pattern also matches one of the patterns in GLOBIGNORE, it is removed from the list of matches.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash Wildcards – Best Way to Expand Glob Pattern

Bash – Configure bash globbing

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