[clug] Ever received a .dat file from an <other OS> user?

[Peter Barker]

On Fri, 15 Jan 2010, Adam Baxter wrote:

> What do the \ ?_? wildcards do?

\ is escaping the following space.  The question marks stand for any 
single character.  So the pattern "part\ ?_?.dat" will match:
"part 1_1.dat"
"part a_b.dat"

See "Pattern Matching" in "man bash".

While we're on shell scripting.... a question of my own.

I vaguely recall a safe way of doing this:

rm -rf $dir_i_do_not_want/$subdir_i_do_not_want.

This is... somewhat unsafe, particularly when run by root.  I *think* I 
recall a shell trick to turn this into a safe operation, so you *don't* do 
something unfortunate to your system should those variables be empty.  Any 
takers?

Yours,
-- 
Peter Barker                          |   Programmer,Sysadmin,Geek.
pbarker at barker.dropbear.id.au	      |   You need a bigger hammer.
:: It's a hack! Expect underscores! - Nigel Williams