shell tricks (Re: bash if file exists)

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Apr 03, 2008 at 06:26:38PM -0400, Derek Martin wrote:
> foo=`echo *.zip |grep -v '*\.zip'`

Incidentally, in this way, echo can be used like ls:

  $ echo *

Why is this useful to know?  Say your system has severe filesystem
corruption, and /bin/ls is one of the files that was corrupted.  In
general, if that happens, ls will not work, but if your shell still
works, you can still get a list of the files in the directory with
that command.  If you want to also see "hidden" files, then this:

  $ echo * .[A-Za-z0-9]*

Of course, that assumes Roman alphanumeric characters.  It doesn't
work very well if you have files called things like  .휴지통 in the
directory.  =8^)


-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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