BASH and wildcard expansion

[Bill Oliver]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2013, Suvayu Ali wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 05:18:40PM -0500, Bill Oliver wrote:
>>
>> # Filename format YYYY_MM_DD--HHMM.zip
>> filename="$log_year-$log_month-$log_day--*.zip"
>>
>> filelist=`ls $filename`
>
> Please don't do this.  A much better solution is:
>
> filelist=($log_year-$log_month-$log_day--*.zip)
>
> See: <http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs>
>
>

Thanks for the comment -- I hadn't thought of that.  However, it doesn't
work and it doesn't make sense to me.  I thought that putting things in
parentheses simply put it in a shell.

In any case, here's my test case.  I created two files:

2013-August-19--a.zip 
and
2013-August-19--ba.zip

Then, using this script:

******************
#!/bin/sh
# Date variables
log_year=`date "+%Y"`
log_month=`date "+%B"`
log_day=`date "+%d"`

# Filename format YYYY_MM_DD--HHMM.zip
filename="$log_year-$log_month-$log_day--*.zip"

filelist=`ls $filename`

echo $filelist
******************


I get the following output:

$ !./j
./jnk.sh
2013-August-19--a.zip 2013-August-19--ba.zip

Using this script:

******************

#!/bin/sh
# Date variables
log_year=`date "+%Y"`
log_month=`date "+%B"`
log_day=`date "+%d"`

# Filename format YYYY_MM_DD--HHMM.zip
filelist=($log_year-$log_month-$log_day--*.zip)


******************

I get:

$ ./jnk2.sh
2013-August-19--a.zip

For some reason, the second file (013-August-19--ba.zip) is not returned...

did you mean

filelist=$(ls log_year-$log_month-$log_day--*.zip)

?  ... but that puts the evil "ls" back in.  The complaint against "ls"
is that it breaks on wacky file names.  That isn't an issue here.


billo