Tagged Questions

2
votes
3answers
89 views

Treatment of backslashes across shells

How do echo and printf treat backslashes in zsh, bash and other shells? Under zsh I get the following behavior: $ echo "foo\bar\baz" foaaz $ echo "foo\\bar\\baz" foaaz $ echo 'foo\bar\baz' foaaz $ ...
6
votes
2answers
104 views

When is double-quoting necessary?

The old advice used to be to double-quote any expression involving a $VARIABLE, at least if one wanted it to be interpreted by the shell as one single item, otherwise, any spaces in the content of ...
2
votes
1answer
122 views

tcsh vs zsh. Escape/control characters

I am having problems running this command to work in zsh: my_command -u something -s X:^0 The command works right away on tcsh, but on zsh I get: zsh: no matches found -s X:^0 This made me ...
1
vote
1answer
88 views

Frequent command “template”: remove parameter expansion escape characters

zsh newbie here... I find myself using a handful of long commands over and over again with slightly different arguments. For example: rsync -havu --progress --rsh='ssh -l mylogin' ...
3
votes
3answers
147 views

Zsh function with su and echo

I'm trying to add a function to my .zshrc that makes adding new USE flags to my /etc/portage/package.use file easier. Normally, I'd have to do su -c 'echo "net-misc/aria2 bash-completion bittorrent" ...
3
votes
1answer
92 views

Escaping quotes for scp

I needed to write a that behaves correctly with nasty (spaces, braces, etc..) filenames. scp -rv "$1" shiny:/Volumes/Seagate3To/\"$1\" This function works, but I don't understand why the quotes ...
1
vote
2answers
128 views

How to scp folders with nasty names using a shell function

I am trying to write a function that I will put on all my machines in order to make it easy to send files at a fixed place on my network. Here is my script so far. Some folder may have duplicates ...
2
votes
2answers
183 views

Piping paths with different types of quotes for slash substitution

I would like to use sed to convert a path with backslashes to the same path with forward slashes: E.g. I would like to pipe \\path\to\file\ and obtain /path/to/file None of the following commands ...
1
vote
2answers
294 views

Weird zsh grep -P behaviour

I connect to server with PuTTY from Windows. I have a long yet not touched (I suppose) by hands of local admin config: $ cat /opt/jira/.subversion/config ... ### must be enabled, which is ...
4
votes
1answer
140 views

printing a string's “canonical print-escaped form”

I'm trying to write a function, I'll call it escape, that will behave like this: % IFS=$' \t\n\000' % escape FOO $IFS FOO=$' \t\n\000' In other words, escape takes two arguments, and then, taking ...
2
votes
1answer
383 views

Wrapping a command that includes single and double quotes for another command

I recently learned about watch, but am having trouble making it work with relatively sophisticated commands. For example, I would like to ask watch to run the following command on zsh every three ...