Re: [RndTbl] bash expansion question

On 2010-07-06 Adam Thompson wrote:

I can't find what I'm looking for in the bash(1) manpage, hoping there's an easy answer...

I want to use a construct like for i in ~/path/*; do something $i && rm $i; done

which works great as long as there are files in ~/path/. However, when the directory is empty, I get: rm: cannot remove `/home/athompso/path/*': No such file or directory

What you want is:

shopt -s failglob for i in /tmp/A/* /dev/null; do echo $i; done bash: no match: /tmp/A/* # gives an error but doesn't exec the do clause

or

shopt -s nullglob for i in /tmp/A/* ; do echo $i; done # outputs nothing, executes no do clause

Using these options lets you still do sane arg quoting in case there are spaces in filenames, etc.