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

[Anthony David]

Peter Barker wrote:
> 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?
Hi Peter

One way might be testing for non-zero length strings

[ -n "$dir_i_do_not_want" ] && [ -n "$subdir_i_do_not_want" ] && rm -rf 
$dir_i_do_not_want/$subdir_i_do_not_want

Anthony
>
> Yours,